Special Feature Lesson:

 Beehive Math

Overview:
Students complete word problems based on information about honeybees and their lives as part of a colony.

Curriculum Focus:
science
math

Materials:
N/A

Activity::

Here are eight honeybee facts from More About, along with suggestions for turning them into math problems. You can modify them according to your students' skill level.

1. A worker bee lives two months. If there are 12 months in a year, much of the year does the bee live, in terms of a fraction or a percentage of the year?

2. If one out of every four bees in the colony is a drone, what percentage of the population is made up of drones? If there are 28,000 bees in the colony, how many are drones?

3. Each trip a worker bee makes to gather food lasts 60 minutes. Of this time, 20 minutes is spent in flight. If the bee visits 8 flowers in the remaining time, how much time is spent at each flower?

4. One day, a worker bee made five food-gathering trips. The distance traveled during each trip was:
(a) 0.5 miles   (b) 1.5 miles   (c) 0.6 miles   (d) 3.2 miles  (e) 2.8 miles

What was the total distance the worker bee traveled? What was the average distance the worker bee traveled?

5. A honeybee egg is laid June 1st. It hatches three days later. What date does it hatch? The honeybee reaches adulthood 18 days later. What date is this? The honeybee dies 60 days later. What date does it die? What is the total number of days the honeybee lives?

6. A worker bee visits 12 cells to check for eggs. Three of the cells have unhatched eggs. Six of the cells have newborn bees. Three cells are empty. What percentage of cells have unhatched eggs? What percentage of cells are empty? Is the percentage of cells with newborn bees greater than, less than or equal to, the percentage of cells that have unhatched eggs or are empty?

7. A queen bee lays one egg per minute. How may eggs does she lay in one hour? How many eggs does she lay in one day?

8. A queen bee measures 1.5 inches long. A worker bee measures 0.5 inches long. How many times bigger is a queen bee than a worker bee?

Extension idea:
Help students research facts regarding another social animal: human beings! Be creative—gather statistics about a variety of aspects of people's lives, from populations to grocery budgets to time spent on daily activities. Challenge students to turn these facts into math problems they can share with the class. Or, have them make visual representations of some of the math solutions from this activity.