🐝 How do honeybees talk by dancing?

Honeybees buzz busily around the flower garden. Let's meet one of nature's smallest but busiest workers.

📷 A honeybee covered in pollen inside a purple flower. Can you spot the yellow pollen on its body?

What kind of animal is the honeybee?

Honeybees are insects that live together in a single hive, tens of thousands at a time. A colony has a queen who lays eggs, many worker bees who build the hive and gather nectar, and male bees called drones. All of the hardworking worker bees are female.

When a worker bee finds a garden full of flowers, it flies home and does a dance, wiggling its body in a figure-eight pattern. The direction of the dance and how long it wiggles tell the other bees which way the flowers are and how far away. Honeybees collect nectar from flowers and turn it into honey that can be stored in the hive for a long time.

As honeybees fly from flower to flower, pollen sticks to their bodies and is carried to other flowers, which helps plants make fruit and seeds. Many of the fruits and vegetables we eat grow thanks to bees. That makes honeybees small but very important workers in nature.

🔍 Things to observe

• Count how many stripes are on a honeybee's body.
• Find the yellow balls of pollen on the legs of a bee sitting on a flower.
• Look at photos of the six-sided cells in a honeycomb.

🖍️ Tips for drawing together with your child

• Draw an oval body with alternating yellow and black stripes.
• Add two small pairs of see-through wings, and draw lots of flowers.
• Draw busily with more than 30 lines, and Busy Buzz will zoom around happily.

💬 Let's talk about it

• If you gave directions by dancing like a bee, what dance would you do?
• Without bees, which fruits might we not be able to eat?

🏪 In the game: Busy Buzz

In Animal Drawing Shop, the honeybee visits as a customer named “Busy Buzz.” Busy Buzz asks for pictures on themes like a flower garden, something sweet, friends, and loves it when you draw busily, with more than 30 lines. Use plenty of the customer's favorite colors and draw with care to earn more coins. Try drawing with the real animal's features in mind!

Favorite colors: yellowblack