Un-Bee-lievable! — Agriculture Lessons!
Bees are vital for the existence of the planet. They pollinate flowers which allow fruits and vegetables to grow, just like in our game!
1 in 3 mouthfuls of the food you eat relies on bees for pollination! There are half a million beehives registered in Australia and each hive has 50–60,000 bees! There are three types of bees in beehives the Queen, the Drones and the Worker bee.
The bees that do most of this pollination are European Bees, but we also have 1700 species of Australian Native Bees!
Unlike lots of other animals in Australia, our native bees rarely hurt you! Lots of them live by themselves and some don’t even have stings! But most of these bees don’t produce honey and if they do then they need it — so we don’t harvest it.
In our bee game, our bee collects some pollen and then distributes it to another flower that turns into fruit. After our game, the bee would do a little dance to communicate to other bees where the nectar and pollen are. Then they would all go out to find it!
Some farmers use a different type of bee that is used for pollination. It looks like this:
That’s right, it’s a robot! In the tomato greenhouse at Guyra this robot travels along tracks to help pollinate flowers. It uses AI to find the flowers that are ready for pollination and sends air pulses through the air to vibrate the flower in a way that mimics bees. (there’s a great video showing how it works here)
There’s so much opportunity for innovation and technology in pollination! Like this greenhouse that uses seawater to grow plants in South Australia, or the pollinating robot at Guyra in NSW.
If you’re looking for further educational resources on bees and pollination and other agriculture industries, as well as Science curriculum matching head to Primezone — https://www.primezone.edu.au/?s=bee
If you’d like to learn about technology and coding in other Agriculture industries, head to our blog for more info — https://medium.com/code-club-australia
And don’t miss the other coding lessons that are part of this module at https://codeclubau.org/projects/topics/agriculture/
All the lessons are free and matched the Digital Technologies curriculum.
Register your free Code Club and getting kids coding in your community — codeclubau.org
Here’s our reference list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_native_bees
https://www.primezone.edu.au/resource/where-would-we-bee-without-them/
