Bee Activities to Teach the Life Cycle of a Bee for Preschoolers and Kids of All Ages

Teach your preschoolers and older kids all about the life cycle of a bee with these fun bee activities. Have you ever just watched a bee buzzing around your flower bed? Bees are a lot of fun to watch! Teaching young children about bees with hands-on activities and great books is an excellent way to teach them about life cycles and pollination.

Learning about Bees for Preschoolers

Teach your preschooler all about the life cycle of a bee with these fun bee activities. These Life Cycle Activities for Kids and Learning about Bees for Preschoolers with Bee Printables Make for the Best Bee Preschool theme

Life Cycle of a Bee for Preschoolers

Sometimes, bees may seem scary to young children. Learning about these amazing insects can help dispel any fears your preschooler might have about bees.

And even though I am saying this is for preschoolers, it’s full of great information and activities for children of all ages.

Here, let’s explore some fun bee activities for preschoolers, the fascinating life cycle of a bee, and some great tips for helping children learn not to fear bees. Why not start by sharing some fun facts?

8 Fun Bee Facts for Preschoolers

My kids love learning fun facts about animals, plants, and insects. Once they learned that a single bee produces only a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime, they told everyone they knew. It also made them aware of how precious our 16 oz jar of local honey truly is!

Check out these other super fun facts all about bees:

Bees have 5 eyes.
Male bees don’t have a stinger.
Bee hives commonly contain about 50,000 bees!
The flavor of the honey, depends on where the bees got the pollen.
Bees have yellow poop!
Scientists have discovered that bees can recognize and remember human faces.
⅓ of our global food supply is pollinated by bees!
Bees have their own language for communicating with other bees.
There are four different stages in the life cycle of a bee.

Preschool Bee Activities

Bee Life Cycle Printable Activities

What are the four stages in the life of a bee?

Teaching your preschoolers about life cycles is one way you can help them to understand and connect with the natural world. The life cycle of a bee is divided into four distinct stages:

Egg

The queen spends her whole life laying eggs inside the hive. Did you know she can lay 2,000 eggs every day? Each of these little eggs will become a honey bee.

Fertilized eggs are girls, and they become worker bees or a new queen. Eggs that aren’t fertilized become boys, also known as “drones.”

Eggs transition to the next stage in the life cycle after just six days.

Larvae

The next stage in the life cycle of a bee is the larvae stage. During this stage, the workers feed the larvae and decide which special larvae get to be the next queen. Then, the worker bees seal the larvae in their own little honeycomb cell where they will stay until the larvae become pupa.

Pupa

This is the third stage in the life cycle, and they’re finally starting to look like the bees you and I recognize! Pupa develop eyes, legs, and wings to use as full-grown adult bees.

Adult

The final stage in the bee’s life cycle is the adult stage. Adult bees emerge from their honeycomb cells ready to work in the beehive for the rest of their lives.

Make time to watch bees flying around in their natural environment after learning about the four stages of the bee’s life cycle. That way, preschoolers can develop connections between natural life and their lessons.

Bee Activities for Kids

Bee Books for Kids

Bee is for Books

I love to read to my children. Reading aloud is an important part of early learning for preschoolers. As you learn about bees and their amazing life cycle, give children the opportunity to study some great books about bees to help them connect with what they are learning in a fun and imaginative way.

Preschoolers will love the fantastic pictures of bees at every stage in their life cycle found in You Wouldn’t Want to Live Without Bees! by Alex Woolf. This entertaining non-fiction book all about bees personifies the buzzing insects in a way that makes them relatable and fun for young children.

Future entomologists will have fun exploring Piotr Socha’s The Book of Bees. It is an amazing full color, large scale, encyclopedic picture book filled with everything you ever wanted to know about bees. We have checked it out of the local library at least a dozen times!

Bee Activities for Early Learning Fun

There are so many ways you can help preschoolers explore bees that incorporate early learning skills in a fun hands on way. While you’re teaching your kids about the life cycle of a bee, why not practice early math skills?

CLICK HERE FOR HONEY BEE THEME PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES

24 Pages of Hands-on learning with activities that include puzzles, mazes, math, handwriting, fine motor skills, playdough mats, alphabet activity sheets, and more.

Bee Theme Math Activities

Exploring Shapes with Beehives

Why are beehives made up of hexagons? Not only do hexagons fit together perfectly, but hexagonal cells in a hive also provide the most efficient use of space and more structural integrity than circular or square shaped cells.

You can teach your preschoolers how to recognize hexagons as you study images of bees in the hive. Have children practice tracing or drawing their own hexagons. For added fun, kids can use their imagination to draw their own bees inside each hexagon they trace.

Beehives are natural engineering marvels!

Try a STEM building experiment by creating your own paper hive. You can teach your kids about the structural integrity of a beehive by creating 3D paper hives using different shapes. Explore building with cylinders, cubes, and pyramids. Challenge children to create a more efficient model than the bees!

Bee Movement Activities

Buzz Like a Bee

Incorporating movement and music into any lesson is an excellent way to encourage preschoolers to be physically active. Music helps children build connections and develop motor skills, early literacy skills, language skills, and express emotions. Besides, singing and dancing around while you learn about bees is a lot of fun!

Expose preschoolers to the benefits of classical music through pieces like Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov while they “fly” around the room like bees “buzzing” and giggling.

For extra fun, arrange flowers (real or fake) around the room and give preschoolers water droppers filled with “pollen” (water) to “pollinate” the flowers around the room just like real bees.

This activity will help early learners to understand how bees help to pollinate flowers, fruits, and vegetables. It’s also an excellent way for preschoolers to build fine motor skills that are essential for early handwriting.

I can’t wait to hear all about how you’re exploring bees in nature and learning about these amazing creatures through fun activities with your preschoolers.

Share your stories in the comments, and don’t forget to check back soon for more preschool learning activities and animal life cycle lessons.