Sunday, December 30, 2012

Messy Fingers in Jan

We have a January schedule at the Millbury Public library! The programs will be Jan. 8, 15, 22 and 29.

The programs are on Tuesdays from 10:30 until 11:30am at the Millbury Public Library. This is a parent - child program, please plan to say and participate with your preschool aged child. Younger siblings are welcome, however many of the programs are not appropriate for toddlers.

We are going to explore ice and snow, dinosaurs, and bears in January. Be ready for some goofy science and lots of fun!

Please sign up at the Millbury Public Library - 508 865 1181!

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Book Review: The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive


The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole is one of my very favorite bee books. The Magic School bus visits a bee yard and ends up inside the hive where the students learn about the different kinds of bees and how they make honey. The kids turn in to bees and have to navigate the sometimes treacherousness world in the hive.

What I really like about this book, and the whole set of books by Ms. Cole, are the extra facts along the edges of the pages. If you want to know  more about something, there it is.

As a beekeeper, this book covers everything. That's why I recommend it to adults and kids - this is all the background information you need to understand the bees. If you are interested in being a beekeeper, there are other things you need to know about beekeeping, but this covers the bee parts nicely.

While I prefer to have non-fiction books photographed rather than illustrated, this book has a foot in both camps and the illustrations are accurate when drawing the bees.

5 out of 5 stars.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Animal of the Week: Honeybee


Honeybees are wonderful animals. They pollinate many of our food crops and I've heard a few different estimates, but one out of every three or four bites of food you eat was pollinated by bees. I can't believe that I've never had honeybees as my Animal of the Week.

I am a beekeeper and I have Honeybees. Honeybees are one of about 20,000 different species of bee. Some you are probably familiar with like the bumble bee and the carpenter bee. Other bees you will probably hear about in the New England area are Mason bees and Red bees.

Honeybees make honey by drinking the nectar of flowers, putting that in a special honey stomach and then back at the hive, they put the nectar in a cell and evaporate out nearly all of the water. Yum!

One of the most common questions I hear this time of year is what do they do in the winter.  Bees cuddle for the winter!  They use their body heat to keep their mom, the Queen warm and they keep the temperature in the hive just over 60'F. Beekeepers call it a cluster.

When ever the temperature is 50'F or over the bees fly around. They are really enjoying flying today gathering any last remaining pollen and cleaning up the honey I left out for them.

Go bees!!