2. Assembly 1. Overview 3. Play

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Maria Dalton
6 years ago
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1 Bee-matching game 2. Assembly You will need a color printer, laminator, scissors, magnets and/or Velcro tape, and hot glue. Additionally, you will need a surface such as a tri-fold board, felt board, etc. 1. Print and cut out the six plant ovals and the six bee cards. 2. Laminate with a tough plastic (we do ours at FedEx Office). 3. Trim the excess plastic from around the shapes. 4. Affix either magnets or Velcro to each card so the bee cards stay on the plant cards when matched. a. We use 1 diameter disc magnets (available at hardware stores). Hot-glue a magnet to the back of each card. (Magnetic tape is not strong enough.) b. Alternatively, Velcro dots can be attached to the back of the bee cards and the front of the plant cards. 1. Overview This document contains the images used to make the bee-matching game shown above. (Board design is not included.) The design depicts six edible plants and six native bee species that are important pollinators of those plants. Participants match the bees to the corresponding plants. The take-home is that not all bees do the same job. Instead, diverse bees with different foraging behaviors support pollination of different crops. The pictures also highlight the connection between the bee-flower interaction and the food we later get to eat. 5. Affix the plant cards to a surface this could be a felt board, table top, etc. We use Velcro to keep the plant cards on the display board during use. 6. The bee cards are the game pieces that participants match (and attach) to plants. 3. Play A key to the bee-plant interactions is included at the end of this document with highlights about each species. We find that adults and kids both enjoy this activity. We usually give a small prize, such as our bee trading cards, for participating..

2 Blueberries Thomas Kriese Tiia Monto

3 Tomatoes Sanjay Acharya Ton Rulkens

4 Apples Rosser1954 Scott Bauer

5 Squash E. Youngsteadt Mark Buckawicki Elsa Youngsteadt (license

6 Passionfruit E. Nielsen Pollinator (Wikimedia)

7 Sunflower seeds Bruce Fritz

Carpenter bee Squash bee Blueberry bee Elsa

Payne Blue orchard bee Bumble bee Sunflower bee

Roberts Martin LaBar Lynette Schimming Image

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.

8 Carpenter bee Squash bee Blueberry bee Elsa Youngsteadt Susan Ellis Jerry A. Payne Blue orchard bee Bumble bee Sunflower bee Jason D. Roberts Martin LaBar Lynette Schimming Image sources (L to R): Elsa Youngsteadt (license (used with permission)

9 Key Blueberries: Blueberry bee (Habropoda laboriosa) Blueberry bees are important pollinators of blueberry crops in the southeast. One female blueberry bee can pollinate nearly 50,000 flowers in her lifetime. Because these bees continue to work in cool, cloudy weather, they can pollinate even when honey bees refuse to come outside. Blueberry bees prefer to collect pollen from flowers of blueberry plants and their close relatives, but are also often found on redbud and Carolina jessamine. Tomatoes: Bumble bee (Bombus species) Bumble bees will visit many kinds of flowers, but they are especially important for tomatoes. For a bee to gather tomato pollen, it has to grab the flower and buzz its wings to make the pollen pop out. Bumble bees can do this, but honey bees can t. Captive bumble bee colonies are often used to pollinate tomatoes grown in greenhouses. Sunflower seeds: Sunflower bee (Svastra obliqua) Native bees, including sunflower bees, are economically important in hybrid sunflower seed production. Not only do they pollinate sunflowers themselves, they also bump honey bees off the flowers. This forces the honey bees to move more often between male and female plants, making them better pollinators. Squash: Squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa) When squash flowers open at dawn, squash bees are the first to arrive. These bees collect pollen only from squash flowers, and even dig their nests in the ground under the squash plants. This dedication makes them a key pollinator of squash such as zucchini and pumpkin. As the range of domesticated squash plants expanded from Mexico across North America with prehistoric humans, squash bees followed the squash. Passionfruit: Carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) Carpenter bees can be pestiferous, drilling holes in porches and biting through flowers to steal the nectar without pollinating. But for one group of plants, carpenter bees really shine: the passion vines. These plants rely mainly on carpenter bees for pollination. Carpenter bees are sometimes mistaken for bumble bees, but the back end of a carpenter bee is smooth, black, and shiny. The back end of a bumble bee is always fuzzier. Apples: Blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria) Their preference for fruit-tree flowers and their willingness to work in cool, cloudy weather make blue orchard bees important pollinators for cherries, almonds, apples, and other spring-flowering fruits and nuts. They are sometimes raised especially for this purpose and stocked in orchards for pollination. It takes only 250 female orchard bees to pollinate an acre of apples; by contrast, it takes 1 2 honey bee hives (with thousands of bees per hive) to do the same job. Note: Of the bees featured here, only bumble bees are social like honey bees--meaning they live in groups where one queen lays eggs and the rest of the bees are workers who help take care of the hive and raise the queen s young. (A bumble bee colony is still much smaller than a honey bee colony.) Carpenter bees can also form small social groups with some division of labor between egg laying and foraging. The rest of the species are solitary, meaning each female builds and provisions her own nest.

Pollination A Sticky Situation! A lesson from the New Jersey Agricultural Society s Learning Through Gardening program

Pollination A Sticky Situation! A lesson from the New Jersey Agricultural Society s Learning Through Gardening program OVERVIEW: Pollination is a sticky situation. In this active lesson, students learn