Blog Post from Cailan

What Are Bee Hives For?

Bees make their hives to store food and shelter the bees. Bees make their

hives to protect them. The bees store anything from eggs, to pollen, to honey.

When the bee hive is getting built by the bees, the bees produce beeswax

to create a strong and hard interior of the beehive. They use the beeswax

to make these perfect little hexagon shapes in the hive. They store the food

and eggs in them. These are called honeycombs.

Jobs Inside The Hive

The three main types of bees are the worker bee, drone bee and the queen bee. When the queen lays an egg she can either lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg. A fertilized egg hatches into a worker bee or queen bee, while an unfertilized egg will hatch into a drone bee. A worker bee is only female and they have all the jobs to do from collecting nectar, producing honey, keeping the hive clean, guarding the hive and making wax. For every 100 worker bees there are, there is a drone bee. Unlike the female worker bees, drones do not have stingers and gather neither nectar nor pollen. The drone bees primary job is to mate with a queen bee. After mating season the drone bee gets kicked out of the hive. The drone either dies of starvation or freezes. The queen bee is the most important bee of them all and only has one job, she produces new bees. Without the queen bee or a drone the whole hive would die out.

Space Animationi

Today my class and I made animations and mine was about a rocket. I learnt how to loop the video without using screencastify. We changed all the falses to trues and changed the 3000 to a different number. I changed the 3000 to 100.

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Why Are Bees Declining?

 Success Criteria:

 We will plan and then write an information report on a topic of our choice related to bees.

Our report will:

• Be interesting!
• Give information about a topic of our choice related to bees.
• Show a clear link to our planning.
• Start with an opening statement about our topic.
• Have at least 3 paragraphs.  Each paragraph will have an opening statement and a series of facts related to that statement.
• Include some complex or compound sentence structures.
• Include at least one diagram, photograph, illustration or map to go with the text.
• Finish with a general statement about the topic.
• Use information from at least 3 different sources.  This information will be written in our own words and we will write down our sources at the end of our report.

Why Are  Bees Declining?

Bees are dying and they need to pollinate our flowers. If the bees died we would not have much food because around 100 crop species feed 90% of the world. Around 70% of our food grows from a flower and needs to be pollinated so they can reproduce seeds so they can grow again.   About 200-250 bees die a day. In 2016 US beekeepers lost 33% of their bees. If bees die and stop pollinating not only will the plants die but the animals that eat the pollinated plants will also die which will mess up the food chain.

One of the reasons that bees are dying is because they are getting poisoned by pesticides. Pesticides are usually sprayed over plants. The bees crawl over the plants and the chemicals attack insects by harming their nerve systems. Scientists also say that the pesticides interfere with the bees brain stopping them from learning so they don't remember what food they need to eat so they slowly die. Their population has gone down by 25 percent  in the past years.

The second reason why bees are dying is because of Varroa mites and they are the worst problem. The mites sneak into the beehive and they wait for the wax to cover the spots were the bees lay their eggs. When they get in they wait for the bees to lay their eggs. When the bee lays the eggs the mites feed on the eggs so they can reproduce and repeat what they do. The mite attached to the body of the bee and weakens the bee by sucking its body which kills them. 

Sources:  The Telegraph, Entomology and Wikipedia.

Jack's Animation

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Jack Topliss

Room 7

Karoro School

WALT To get it the speed I wanted I went to HTML. I had to change the falsies to true and change the 3000 to 200.

Why Are Bees Declining

Why Are Bees Declining?

WALT

We are learning to write an information report.

 Success Criteria:

 We will plan and then write an information report on a topic of our choice related to bees.

Our report will:

Be interesting!

Give information about a topic of our choice related to bees.

Show a clear link to our planning.

Start with an opening statement about our topic.

Have at least 3 paragraphs.  Each paragraph will have an opening statement and a series of facts related to that statement.

Include some complex or compound sentence structures.

Include at least one diagram, photograph, illustration or map to go with the text.

Finish with a general statement about the topic.

Use information from at least 3 different sources.  This information will be written in our own words and we will write down our sources at the end of our report.

Bees have been declining for the last 20 years. The population is still decreasing as I write. It is not good that the bee population is declining. The three main reasons bees are declining is intensive farming, climate change and varroa mites.

Intensive Farming 

Intensive land use is destroying the bees habitat and the bees are dying because they

lose their habitat and shelter. Intensive farming is taking up too much of the space

so the bees can not live anywhere.

Intensive farming is not good for the environment because it kills the animals and destroys the forest. For intensive farming they also use pesticides which affects the bees because they spray it on the plants and flowers where the bees crawl all over the plants and kills them.

How Climate Change Is Bad For Bees

Climate change is causing habitat loss as bees fail to migrate to cooler areas and establish new hives. As average monthly temperatures rise, flowers bloom earlier in the spring, creating a potential mismatch in seasonal timing between when flowers produce pollen and when bees are ready to feed on that pollen. Even a small mismatch of three to six days could negatively affect bees' health, making them less likely to reproduce and less resistant to predators and parasites. 

Varroa Mites

Varroa mites are one of the worst problems why bees are declining. Varroa mites sneak into the hive.  By sneaking into the hive they attach to the adult bees and feed on them until they get to the hive. Once bees are in the hive they slip undetected  into a vulnerable uncapped *brood* cells and this is where the Varroa mites feed on the undeveloped bees. Brood cells means a cell used for the rearing of a larva. These were the three main reasons why bees are declining.

http://sos-bees.org/causes/

https://friendsoftheearth.uk/bees/what-are-causes-bee-decline

https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/bee-decline.html

Wairini's Space Animation

Today my class and I made animations and mine was about a rocket. I learnt how to loop the video without using screencastify. We changed all the falses to trues and changed the 3000 to a different number. I changed the 3000 to 100.

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Bee Experts by Billie Williams

Bee Experts

Learning Intentions

We are learning to understand the importance of bees in nature
through learning about pollination and interdependence.

We are learning to take key information from an information report
and write it in our own words. 

Writing task: Bee experts

Write a paragraph about how bees pollinate flowers. 

The paragraph should:

• Have a heading.
• Have a minimum of four sentences.
• Explain how bees pollinate flowers.
• Tell us why this is important.
• Be aimed for Miss Ireland's class so they can understand this.
• Be written in your own words.
• Use your photo of your flower cut in half.
• Use an additional photo or diagram if you wish.

How Do Bees Pollinate?

Have you ever wondered how flowers get pollinated or how bees pollinate them?
Bees are very important to us humans and other animals on the food chain. These
are critical pollinators.  They pollinate things you wouldn't even think of, such as
tomatoes, lemons nuts, apples, carrots and so on. This is crucial because we
would only have two thirds of the food in the supermarkets if it weren't for bees.
We would also have less vitamins than we have now. 

 So how do Bees pollinate? 

The innocent bee goes into the flower looking for nectar but doesn't know it's
getting set up to reproduce the flower seeds. As the bee goes into the flower
to get the nectar it gets pollen brushed on it from the anther (male part) part
of the flower. When the bee has done it's stuff( eating), it goes  to the next flower
where the pollen brushes off it and onto the stigma (female part). This is fertilizing
the seeds so the flower can reproduce. The pollen from that flower can only go to
the same species of flower. 

http://karorobilliew.blogspot.com/2019/06/bee-experts.html