Canadian Honey & Bee Activities
Download our free Bee Activity book for Families!
Bees are an essential part of our ecosystem and economy. About 1/3 of the crops we eat wouldn’t exist without bee pollination, and honey accounts for $4.6 billion of the Canadian economy each year. For many families who are looking for some free learning opportunities in nature, bees are an exciting study.
It’s easy to walk into your backyard or nearby park anywhere in Canada (and throughout the world), find a brightly-coloured flower, and there’s a very good chance you’ll see a honey bee. Event for grandparents, aunts, and uncles, or parents of families who aren’t homeschooling, this free activity book includes fun activities for an evening or weekend with the kids to help them learn while exploring and develop a fascination with the incredible world of the honey bee. Just with our eyes, we can see how a honey bee flies, how it lands on a flower, pokes around for nectar, and then flies to another flower for investigation.
Bees only sting if they feel threatened, and most of the time, that’s when they feel like their hive is in danger, so watching from a reasonable distance poses no concern, but still allows us to get close enough to see their movements and details.
Enjoy Honey as part of this Free Printable Activity Book
Another perk to a bees unit study is that you can’t learn about the life cycle of a bee, or learn about how they collect nectar without also talking about honey, which is a perfect opportunity to try out a few recipes. The Great Canadian Honey recipes in our free printable Bee Activity Book are specifically created with the whole family in mind.
We don’t have over-simplified recipes where you drizzle honey on top of something or spread it with peanut butter on toast. Our recipes range from an afternoon snack, a pre-meal salad, a delicious dessert to a bowl of punch to share with friends.
In every case, we’ve excluded all processed sugar from our recipes and balanced them out with honey instead. Recipe instructions are simple measurements and include ingredients that you probably already have at home.
Perfect for a supplement, or a short bee unit study
The resources in our free printable bee activity book are easy for the whole family to understand. Activities range from preschool ages up to middle school ages, from simple coloring pages, puzzles, or a word search to a highly-detailed bee coloring page for adults to enjoy.
Most preschoolers and homeschool students tell us they simply love making and tasting the recipes while learning about honeybees, combining creative arts, culinary class, and science all at once! This bee unit study can take an afternoon, or occupy an entire week, depending on how many recipes you try together as a family, and how much time you choose to take in nature watching worker bees come and go.
It’s easy to create additional activities to go along with this study on the life cycle of bees, and how they collect honey.
- Wander your backyard and allow your homeschool student to take pictures of bees when they find them on flowers.
- Look in the underside of eaves of buildings, sheds, and pavilions at your local park to see if you can find honey bees coming and going from a hive in hiding.
- While wearing a blindfold, taste a few different types of honey as a homeschooling snack on a cracker or cookie. Can you tell the difference between creamed honey and pure liquid honey?
- What other products can we produce from the honey and beeswax other than honey to eat?
- What other ways can honey be used, other than as food?
- Write a poem about the life of a bee. How would you spend your day as a honeybee?
- Write about the differences between the life of a queen bee, and the life of a worker bee.
Many curriculums have a unit studying the health benefits of honey, the life cycle of a bee, how pollen gets from one plant to another, or insects in the world around us. This free printable ebook is the perfect supplement to that unit with super simple hands-on activities, so your kids use their playtime as learning time.
What is included in our free Printable Honey Bee Activity Book?
- 9 recipes ranging from snacks, punch, salad dressing, main courses, and of course, dessert with instructions easy enough for kids to understand. Let your student make an afternoon snack, a fruity punch with honey for guests, or prepare a portion of dinner while you’re preparing the rest!
- Full-colour graphic of the life cycle of a honey bee.
- Printable activities like coloring pages (for kids and adults), line tracing games, and puzzles.
- A full page of fun facts about bees. Use Google or YouTube to learn more about each fact in the bee unit study.
