Kid's Bee Activity

May is one of our favourite months of the year. Why? Well, world bee day is approaching of course!

This month, let's celebrate the incredible contributions of our buzzing friends with a fun and educational activity: crafting a paper mâché bee! 🎨🐝

These were so easy and fun to make, and luckily, most of the materials can be found at home. Why don't you craft along with us and make your own bees?

Here's what you need:

Materials

1. Balloon/s: Use round balloon/s and blow it up to the size you want.
2. Newspaper/tissue paper: Torn into strips to go over the balloon/s to form the bee body.
3. White Tissue Paper and Tape: For the wings.
4. Flour: All-purpose/plain flour to make the paste.
5. Water: Add enough water to the flour to make a creamy paste.
6. Paint Brush: Dip into paste and stick on paper strips.
7. Salt: This will prevent mold growth if you are planning on keeping your bees for a while.  the papier-mâché project will be kept for a long time.
8. Optional: To make the mixture a bit thicker and improve adhesion you can add some PVC glue or cornstarch.
9. Acrylic Paints: To paint your completed bee you will need yellow, white and black paint.

Once you have all your materials together, the fun begins as you paste layer upon layer of the paper strips on the balloon.

We added a bit of glue to our paste. We pasted strips of tissue paper over balloons using the paste mixture. We pasted around 8 layers over the balloons to make the bee bodies nice and strong. At this point we left the bee bodies to dry for about 2 days - this is the hardest bit as we were keen to decorate the bees! 

To keep the oval shape we rested the bee body shapes in a bowl to dry. After 2 days the bodies were nice and hard. We cut the ends of the balloons so that we could make the bee "head" nice and smooth by adding a bit more paper with the mixture. Let this dry again, although it shouldn't take as long as the bodies. 

We were excited to start decorating the bees. First off we painted the whole bodies white to cover any printing. We let that dry and then we carefully drew the lines around the bodies to make the bee stripes. We left the head section black so that the little white and black eyes stood out more. We cheated a little with the eyes by making them with some photocopy paper and gluing them on. But hey, if it works, go with it!

To give our bees a bit of a glossy finish we painted with some Modge Podge glue but this isn't essential. To make the wings we used layers of tissue paper cut roughly into an oval shape. If you don't have tissue paper, you can just use newspaper for a different but interesting look. We used some tape to bring the tissue paper together to make a wing shape. And voila! We had our bees!

We had many lovely discussions with our kids about the importance of bees in our ecosystem and their amazingly complex social system.

 If you do try this at home or in the class room, make sure you tag us in Instagram - @bandicute_australia