Movie Night

Celebrate Oscars week by watching an animated, family-friendly honeybee film

One of our favorite honeybee-themed animated films is currently streaming on Amazon Prime: “Maya the Bee.” If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you can watch the film for free.

The movie has all sorts of fun facts about honeybees and some good lessons for kiddos who want to know more about these fascinating insects.

Family honeybee trivia fun

After watching the film, here are some fun-fact questions you can ask your little ones to help them learn more about the wonderful world of honeybees:

1. Flip, the violin-playing grasshopper, says to Maya, “What do you know, bees do have teeth.” Is that true, do honeybees really have teeth?
2. Of the 100 crops/foods that provide 90% of the world’s foods, how many are pollinated by honeybees?
3. The Queen jokes to Maya that she is going to have to keep an eye on her, to which Maya replies, “Which one, Queen?” Which begs the question: How many eyes do honeybees have?
4. How do honeybees tell each other where all the yummy, nectar-filled flowers are located?
5. True or false: Archeologists found stored honey in the tomb of King Tut (1341–1323) when it was excavated in 1922, and the honey was still edible!

ANSWERS:

1. Well, kind of. In a sense, honeybees do have “teeth” on their mandibles (jaws) but they aren’t like the teeth we humans have. The honeybee’s mandibles are “toothed” with narrow or rounded points, and they don’t use them to chew food. Honeybees use these “teeth” for tasks like foraging, collecting pollen, digging into flowers, comb-building, feeding larvae (baby honeybees) and defending themselves.
2. 71 are pollinated by honeybees and other pollinators, like butterflies.
3. Honeybees have five eyes – two large compound eyes, which are made up of thousands of tiny lenses, and three smaller eyes called “simple eyes” or ocelli eyes, which are in the center of its head.
4. They do a honeybee dance called the “waggle.” With a few simple moves, the honeybee can relay the direction of the nectar source, how bountiful it is and how far the bees need to travel to get to it. Once she gets the attention of her hive mates – by letting them sample the pollen and nectar she gathered at the source – the dance begins. Read more about the honeybee waggle HERE.
5. True!