Bees, Hexagons, and a Honeycomb

Cardboard rolls make an awesome art supply. You can do SO much with them, including making a honeycomb. Here’s how we did it. Oh, and just because I like to be sneaky (which you probably deduced from the name of this blog), I didn’t tell my son what we were making; the suspense nearly killed him [hee hee].

Make marks to divide two paper towel rolls in thirds and using a pencil and ruler, draw two straight lines down the length of each roll. Then measure down the rolls every 2 centimeters, drawing lines across the width of the rolls.

Cut the rolls on these lines. Now, you’ll have tons of flattened football shapes. Fold each strip on the lines. We folded one forward and other backward, so our strips resembled the letter z. Make sure each of the folds is creased well.

Open up the z-shapes and form into hexagons. (This is when my son guessed what we were making.) When finished, begin gluing these hexagons together, adding a paper clip to secure the glued sides until dry. You’ll need LOADS of paper clips.

When this was done, we read The Bumblebee Queen by April Pulley Sayre. It taught us all about the queen bee and her colony. I’m not sure who learned more – me or my son!

Of course, with our honeycomb complete, it was time to make a queen. We used a mini clothes pin, stiffened yellow felt, black ribbon for stripes, googly eyes and a black pom pom for the head. I shaped two wings from silver pipe cleaners in the shape of the capital letter B. We used LOADS of white glue to adhere the wings and gave our bee lots of drying time.

To finish up the activity, my son read Dana Meachen Rau’s book Guess Who Stings, which taught us that a honeybee actually has five eyes (oops, our queen only has two!).

What a fun way to learn about bees, repurpose a few empty cardboard rolls, and discover that a hexagon has six sides!