Shaker Girl Scout Troop helps students to "Bee Aware"

Shaker Heights Girl Scout Troop 70101 is helping spread the awareness of the crucial need to protect honeybees by creating a special hands-on program for third-grade elementary school students, called “Bee Aware." The world’s food supply depends on honeybees as the number one pollinator, yet their numbers have decreased alarmingly in recent years.

To help counteract this problem, the members of Troop 70101 decided to create an interactive program designed to help educate young learners about the role honeybees play, and how humans can protect them.

The troop is made up of Girl Scout Ambassadors Oriana Anderson, Kaitlin Nordstrom, Clio Thorman, Emma Proe, and Celia Pelfrey, all of whom will be seniors at Shaker Heights High School in the fall. Their troop leader is Clara Pelfrey.

On May 21-22, Troop 70101 treated 80 third-graders at Lomond Elementary School to the multi-sensory, interactive program which featured learning stations designed to help answer 5 important questions:

•Why should we save honeybees?

•What are the different types of bees, and what do they do?

•How can you protect the honeybees?

•How do honeybees live?

•What is honey?

The Scouts designed the program to be highly interactive and to appeal to children with different learning styles. They used small-group stations with multi-sensory inputs: smelling flowers and beeswax, tasting honey, and touching models of different kinds of bees, honeycomb and beekeeping equipment.

In creating the program, the troop members took a two-hour course on beekeeping from Case Western Reserve University’s Squire Valleevue farm beekeeping director, Anna Locci, who also lent the troop several hands-on beekeeping tools to use as teaching materials.

Says troop member Clio Thorman, ”You should have seen their faces when the kids realized that every food – even pizza, steak, and French fries – all required a pollinator such as a honeybee somewhere along the way!” Each child received a “BEE Aware, help protect honeybees” refrigerator magnet that they can post at home to help spread the word to their families.

The project served as a pre-requisite for the Scouts to be able to pursue their Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest individual award a Girl Scout can achieve. The troop members are all former students of Lomond Elementary, and wanted to give back to the school where they began their journey as Scouts.

The seniors will be available to help spread the word to other elementary students next school year. To arrange a “Bee Aware” visit from Troop 101, contact Troop Leader Clara Pelfrey at clara.pelfrey@gmail.com.

Want to learn more about protecting honeybees? Read how to save the bees from the Honeybee Conservancy.