The BSN Resident Bees
The BSN has been buzzing about its bee programme since Spring Term – when resident beehives set up shop on each of the campuses. The bee colonies, which live inside boxes set in quite corners of each campus, have been full of activity since their arrival. The BSN bees head out each day to take advantage of the flowers and grasses on our campuses, and students get an opportunity to see this fascinating ecosystem up close at their school.
Bee Day at JSL
In honour of World Bee Day, which was on 20 May, students at Junior School Leidschenveen celebrated their own Bee Day with a full schedule of fun and educational activities. During this term, many classes are studying flowering plants, pollination and life cycles of minibeasts, so Bee Day was a good opportunity to supplement their curriculum with bee-related activities throughout their day. For example, Dutch teachers, music teachers and art teachers all enthusiastically came up with fun and creative ways to include bees in their lessons, like learning bee anatomy in Dutch, creating clay models of bees in art and writing bee-poetry poetry in our EAL department.
Liz Jones, Learning Technology Manager and the BSN’s resident bee expert, held a series of “Meet the Expert” sessions throughout the day where she shared information on bees and their importance to the ecosystem with each year group. She also operated a stall in the playground to answer questions about bees and show bee related artifacts to students during playtime.
Year 5 students got even more hands-on in the afternoon, with some sticky and messy activities including beeswax candle making, honey tasting and creating self-made “seed bombs” – soil balls with bee-friendly flower seeds buried inside.
Having the bee hives on our campuses at the BSN helps to remind students and staff of how very important bees are to the environment, and gives an opportunity to learn more about bees and, in doing so, also learn about how we can do our part to help protect the environment.
That’s a bee-autiful thing!
For more from BSN Environment, follow the Eco Team on twitter at: @BSNEco
