Source: WILD TV: "The Animals We Live With"
Funding for the VITAL/Ready to Teach collection was secured through the United States Department of Education under the Ready to Teach Program.
This video segment from WILD TV offers this daring look at bees, an often misunderstood insect. Mace Vaughan, an entomologist or expert on insects, teaches us about how bees swarm, the jobs of the queen and worker bees, how bees communicate with each other, and how the colony survives. Once you are instructed on how to move and act around bees, you won’t be stung. In fact, this video shows bees swarming on a man’s face. It is called a bee beard.
Download and ShareThe following Frame, Focus and Follow-up suggestions are best suited for elementary or middle school students using this video in an English language arts or science lesson. Be sure to modify the questions to meet your students' instructional needs.
What is Frame, Focus and Follow-up?
Frame (ELA) What helps you come up with ideas when you are writing? For example, how do you draw ideas from past experiences, your feelings and things you like or do not like? How do you use these past experiences in your writing?
Focus (ELA) Think about what kind of writing this video segment might inspire in you.
Follow Up (ELA) After seeing this video, what do you feel like writing? What kind of genre will you use? Will it be fiction or nonfiction? What will be your topic and purpose? How about the theme? Will you add an illustration to make your writing clear? What might that look like? Discuss all the possibilities for writing that this piece inspires. Then talk about what can inspire you or give you new ideas as a writer.
Frame (SCI) What is an entomologist? What do they do, and how do they benefit society and the insect population?
Focus (SCI) Watch how Vaughan’s knowledge of bees and how they behave allows him and Wali to handle the swarm in a safe and responsible way.
Follow Up (SCI) Not everyone should try to handle bees. It takes knowledge and training to know what you are doing. If you were an entomologist, which insect population would you want to study? Why? What goals would you have for studying this population? What would you hope to accomplish to benefit society and the insects?
MACE VAUGHAN: I’m Mace Vaughan and you might think I’m buggin / But I got this bee swarm and it’s bees that I’m lovin / See, bees work hard on their 9 to 5 / Makin’ all that honey just to stay alive
MACE: Bees just chill and do their thing / And if you don’t mess with them, they’re not gonna sting / They work as a team, if you know what I mean / Ten thousand workers and just one queen
CHORUS: Let’s have more honey bees
CHORUS: I’m askin’ pretty please
CHORUS: I’m beggin’ on my knees
CHORUS: Let’s save the honeybees
WALI: Please!
WALI (VO): Bees. Now, I don’t know much about them, except I know I’m always afraid of being stung. I think most people misunderstand bees, so I asked my buddy, Mace Vaughan, to help me out.
WALI: Mace is an entomologist, an expert on insects. He even showed up with his own honeybee swarm. Now, we’re all wearing white because bees are attracted to bright colors. Don’t wear anything dark - you’ll just look like a bear to a bee, trying to steal honey. Whoa...see Mace in that bee beard? How did he do that? We’ll get back to this later.
MACE: We gotta go to the beginning. So, when a colony, when a hive, when it reproduces, when it gets too big for its cavity that it’s inside - it’s gotta get out.
WALI: Okay.
MACE: So what they do is they send out a swarm.
WALI: Right.
MACE: Not all the bees, but maybe half the bees in that colony will leave with the queen.
MACE: Now what they gotta do is they gotta stay together. Now the way they stay together is they use pheromones. Okay, they use perfume, if you want to think of it that way. These bees are smelling for each other. That’s how they talk, in a way.
WALI: Got ya.
MACE: Now the queen has her own pheromone and the workers have theirs and they use these to keep her with them in the swarm. If you were to go to a normal hive, when it was working in the middle of the summer, it’s gonna be full of eggs, and larval bees and pollen and honey and nectar that they’ve just brought back.
MACE: This is a lot of stuff and they need to protect it. Because if they don’t and someone comes in and starts to gather and steal that honey or eat those brood, then the colony’s not gonna survive the winter and they’re gonna die.
WALI: Got ya.
MACE: But when they’re swarming, they’ve got nothing to defend. A swarm of honeybees is an incredibly gentle thing.
WALI (VO): Oh man, to prove his point, Mace is trying to get me to hold a bee swarm. First, I gotta get the queen.
MACE: Okay.
WALI: Ready.
MACE: You ready to go?
WALI: I’m ready.
MACE: Ok. We got sound rolling? You good to go?
WALI: Good to go!
MACE: Okay, let’s see you do it. Remember, don’t pinch them, just go slow and gently move them out of the way.
WALI: Okay, there’s a lot of buzzing, vibrating going on in there.
MACE: That’s good.
WALI: That’s fine?
MACE: Yep. They keep themselves warm. They’re ready for flight.
WALI: Okay, here we go.
WALI: Going in slow. I’ve got the cage.
MACE: You’ve got it. Excellent. The queen is yours.
WALI: I feel them holding on to the...
MACE: That’s good. You can pull...they’ll let go.
WALI: I’ve got the cage.
MACE: Now all these bees are gonna fly up in the air. I’ll help you out here.
WALI: Okay, yeah, okay, good, good idea.
MACE: You can use this hand too, just move it back and forth.
WALI: I forgot I had another hand. Okay, here we go. It’s like a windshield wiper.
MACE: They’re beating their wings to blow it out, blow it out so all these other bees in the air can figure out where to go.
WALI: Ohh.
WALI (VO): Wow, I never thought I’d be holding a swarm of bees, And I didn’t even get stung! And you know what? I kinda like these gals.
WALI: And now, it’s time for the bee beard!
First, close any openings, including nose and ears.
Second, place the queen under your chin. The bees don’t want to lose her, because the colony’s future depends on her laying eggs.
Third - don’t try this at home - watch the swarm grow.
Ta-dah! That’s how you make a bee beard!
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