A Trip to the Bee Ranch

Becca has had a fascination with bees almost since the beginning.  We chose to decorate her nursery with classic Pooh stuff – and a friend helped paint a gorgeous mural on the wall – with Pooh and Piglet floating with their blue balloon away from a hive of overprotective honeybees.  This helped Cody’s mom to determine that she would call Becca “Honeybee.”  So that’s part of it – the early indoctrination.  But, she also loves the little kids show about friendship and family called “The Hive” – where the main character is a little honeybee named “Buzzbee.”  If you haven’t seen it, it really is adorable, and the accents are great – they are all British.  You can find it on Disney Jr, or on Netflix Kids.

But then there’s the other aspect of honeybees that Becca loves, and that’s what they produce – honey!  We go to the farmer’s market at the Pearl Brewery downtown (on the Riverwalk) every Saturday morning and participate in a CSA group with a local farmer.  In walking back and forth to their booth every week, we passed several times (ok, passed every Saturday for like 10 months – I’m ashamed to admit) a booth that I finally stopped at one day.  And man, am I glad I did!!!  The Gretchen Bee Ranch bottles and sells at the market LOCAL honey!  If you’ve been to a grocery store in San Antonio, you know that the closest “Local” you can find is sourced North of Austin… which isn’t local at all since it’s over three hours away and I guarantee you those bees aren’t flying anywhere down here to gather their pollen!  So, if you’re looking for truly local honey to help with allergies, the Gretchen Bee Ranch is the place.  I love that they even have a type of honey sourced in the county where we live – since we live about an hour West of where the ranch is.  It’s awesome too – that every Wednesday they open up their shop for anyone!  No age restrictions!

So I decided it was time to take my little honeybee out to the ranch to meet Mr. Mark (the bee keeper) and to learn some more about honeybees!  You’d have thought I gave her a million bucks.  She has talked about those bees and all the honey she got to taste so much!  She’s also super excited that we’re going back as a family to take Daddy when they have their open house in November!  Here are a few pictures of our experience.  I wish I had taken more!

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We got to look at some “sleepy” bees on their tray, and then in the display case, Mr. Mark pointed out the queen bee, and Becca enjoyed following her around with her finger, and went back a few times to find her again.

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I think she could have stood there and watched those bees all day long!

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She and George followed Mr. Mark over to see the bee hives (from a distance).
She enjoyed looking at the beeswax products, and tasting several kinds of honey!  If you live anywhere near Seguin, it’s worth a trip!

On the way home, she asked me a few questions about the bees, which we typed up together and sent in an email over Facebook, and Mr. Mark’s wife kindly answered them for us.

Here’s what we asked about the bees:

Dear Mr. Mark,
Thank you for showing us the bees and the honey today! I have a couple of questions for you.
How old are the bees? I’m two.
Does the queen have a name? My name is Becca.
How many bees live in a box? We have four people in our house. And two dogs and two fish and our kitty lives outside.
What is a bee’s favorite weather? I like sunny days.
Thank you!

Her Reply/What we learned:

Hello Christy and Becca,
Thanks for visiting the Bee Ranch this morning. Mark is working out in the bee yards so I will help by answering your questions.
The bees all vary in age and depending on the time of year, their life span may be as short as three weeks in summer and three months when it’s winter.
The queen bees do not have names. With over 150 queens, we call them all Queenie.
During summer and at the height of honey production and food availability, a hive can grow to 100,000 bees! During cold times when there is not much to eat on, the queen knows to reduce her colony down to as low as perhaps 20,000.
Bees adapt fairly well to weather but they do love the warm sun so that they can fly out to forage for food! You are just like a honeybee.
Take care and enjoy every day.

Halloween Sensory Gel Bag

Becca loves sensory gel bags… and they are super easy to make!!

You’ll need:
a strong freezer bag (quart size is perfect)
clear book/box tape
clear hair gel – clear works best for this b/c you’re going to be adding your own color… I found a great big bottle at Dollar Tree and used the entire bottle in this bag.
food coloring
stuff to go in it – So I made mine orange, and just used a bunch of sparkly black sequins I had – to make it sort of Halloween-ish.  I saw an idea online that used google-eyes of various sizes.  Or, you could get a bunch of little spiders (I saw them at Dollar Tree) to put inside, or leaf confetti (also at Dollar Tree) if you wanted to make it fall, but NOT Halloween.  So there’s lot of fun options!

Make sure before you put ANYTHING inside that you secure all three closed sides with book tape to prevent little holes and leaks.  Then, fill with your gel, food coloring, and stuff.  Squeeze as much air out as possible, and zip closed, then fold the top down and secure with more tape.

Becca has been enjoying hers not only for picking up and squishing, but also for viewing on her light box!  And how awesome does it look with the light shining thru?

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Animal/Word Matching

This is one of those things that I did totally on the spur of the moment (thus it’s written in crayon), but it became one of Becca’s favorite activities.  A while back, I shared a picture on my Facebook page (stop right here – if you haven’t gone and clicked “like”, I really do share some different things there than I do here – so go over to the right side of my blog there, and click “like!”  And if you have clicked like, thank you!  If you aren’t seeing my posts, go on over to my page and check it out regularly.  The more you “like” posts and make comments, the more likely it is to show up on your newsfeed!)  Anyway, I digressed.  I shared a picture on my Facebook page of Becca playing in her water table inside – I had put our ocean rice (blue and green rice mixed together from this activity) over in the table, added her Underwater Friends Sea Animals (aff link – thank you!), and then up on the top, I had put in her Dozen Small Toy Dinosaurs (aff link – thank you!) because life is always more fun with dinosaurs!  And she was loving playing with them.

So, the next day, she was back over there playing again, and I decided I’d see if she could match the ocean animals to their “name.”  I grabbed a paper and the closest writing utensil (enter the crayon), and scrawled them down.  Then, together, we hunted for the animal’s name and listened to the sounds in the words to match them up.  She did incredibly well with it.  So, I left the paper where she could get to it.

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The next day, I walk over to the table where she is playing, and found that she had over half of them already on the sheet next to the correct names.  The s names were a little challenging, so we worked together to correct those.  This has been a fabulous activity, so I plan to type up the names and then laminate the sheet – and make one also for her farm and jungle animals – so that she can do more animal/word matching in the future.  What an awesome way to start working in more phonics, and word recognition!  This girl wants to read so bad she can taste it.  I even caught her yesterday during her playtime in her room (which she now calls “My reading room” – seriously) running her fingers along under the words, and “reading” – she was looking at her Bible, and though I know she wasn’t actually reading, she was pointing to the words and telling the correct story that went with that page!  Awe the joys of a video monitor. 🙂

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