Bugscope Project

1. Bugscope Project By: Ally Blonien

2. Lifecycle of Honey Bees Queen is female, drones are males, workers are sterile females Workers and queens develop from fertilized eggs while drones develop from the unfertilized eggs of the workers The workers could become queens if they had her diet of royal jelly or brood food The worker bee emerges from her egg after 21 days and has a total lifespan of 6 weeks or 6 months if she is a winter bee The queen emerges after 16 days of being in her egg and lives up to 3 years The drones spend 24 days in the egg and have a total lifespan of 4 months because they are killed by the worker bees in autumn The British Beekeeper’s Association http://www.britishbee.org.uk/articles/life_cycle_apis_mellifera.php Diet and Habitat of Bees Bees undergo a complete metamorphosis with egg, larva, pupa, and adult stages Some bees, like the honey bee and bumble bee, live in social colonies like hives Solitary bees usually build nests or burrows for their eggs The bees provide their larvae with nectar and pollen to eat as they grow in the spring, since summer bees will die in the winter, leaving only eggs behind Winter bees, like honey bees, are able to survive the winter by eating the honey that they produced in the summer University of Kentucky Entomology http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/insects/wasps/bees/bees.htm Bee Facts

3. Before and After • In the second picture, I added more hair to the legs and body of the bee and I added lines inside of the wings to show the segments of the wings. I added more hair after I saw how hairy bees actually were under the hand lens and from the Bugscope pictures and the hand lens helped me to better see what the bee’s wings actually looked like.

4. Real Bee Pictures • The picture on the left is a digital picture of a bee • The picture on the right is a picture of a bee’s head from Bugscope

5. Differences in Pictures • The Bugscope picture is able to show a lot more detail on the bee like the segments in the antennae, the facial features, and the actual amount of hair on the bee’s face and part of the body. • The Bugscope picture also shows how the features of the bee are organized on the bee’s face, like where the antennae come out of the head and where the eyes are in relation to the mouth.

6. NSES Content Standard A: As a result of activities in grades 5-8 all students should develop Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry Understanding about scientific inquiry This relates to the Bugscope activity in that the students will learn how they can answer their own questions by doing scientific observations. The students can create their own questions about bugs and be able to answer those questions through observing the microscope images and through conversing with the entomologists who communicate with them while maneuvering the microscope. The students will also see that the more they learn through observation, the more questions they will have NSES

7. Books Connected to Bugscope • These three books, Are you a Bee? by Judy Allen, A Spring without Bees by Michael Schacker and Bill McKibben, and The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci, all give helpful facts about bees and their lives. Each book is fit for a different age group with Are you a Bee? being more suited for young students up to about 4th grade, The Life and Times of the Honeybee could be used from 3rd to 6th grade and A Spring without Bees would best be used with the upper grades in middle school to high school. • These books could be used to discuss the the life cycles and impact of bees and other insects on the world. Bugscope could then be connected to these books by showing the different features of the bees that allow them to do what they do, like collect pollen and fly, and to dispel any misconceptions that these books may have about bees. The books could also lead the students to create their own questions about bees or other insects that could then be answered using Bugscope.

8. Authenticity of using Bugscope • Bugscope is an authentic use of technology because the students are looking at real images of insects and are talking to credible sources on insects. • Bugscope allows the students to get involved in scientific inquiry in that they will be able to answer some of their previous questions, dispel any of their misconceptions, and come up with more questions that will spark their curiosity to learn more.

9. The Bugscope activity can be applied to art classes in that the students can participate by drawing a picture of a bug from memory and then drawing a new picture of that bug after seeing it under the microscope. This will help the students to see the accuracy of their memory and how their picture can look more realistic with the more details that they add. Bugscope can be used in science class during discussions of insects and what their purpose is in the world. The students will be able to use Bugscope to see the different parts of the insects they are studying and how those parts help the insect to function. For example, they will be able to see how the hairs on a bee are used to collect pollen or how the mouth of a butterfly can sip nectar. Applying Bugscope