Save the Bees! Pollinator Hotel STEM Challenge

lesson overview

Save the bees with this pollinator hotel STEM Challenge!

Activity Overview: Two types of solitary bees, mason and leaf cutter bees, are in search of a new home. They need a safe place to lay eggs. These eggs will turn into baby bees that will pollinate flowers and produce more delicious fruit! First, you will learn about pollinators and the needs of our bee friends. Then design and build a pollinator hotel to provide shelter and a place for bees to lay eggs.

This hands-on activity is an engaging design challenge that allows students to work in teams (or individually), apply the engineering design process, and connect math and science topics to real-world applications.

Engineering Challenge: Students will learn about bees, bee home preferences, and pollination. Students will then research 2 solitary bee types and brainstorm how to create a Pollinator Hotel for solitary bees. Lastly, students are tasked to use the engineering design process to take their brainstormed idea and design and build a pollinator hotel to provide shelter and a place for bees to lay eggs that satisfies this challenge’s design constraints.

Real-world STEM Connection:

• Electrical Engineering

• Entomologist

• The decline in bee population

• Types of bees

• Pollinators

As with many STEM activities, this challenge can be tailored to students of various skill levels and abilities.

Included in this product:

• Detailed teachers guide with links to resources

• Photos and videos of student examples

• Student handouts to guide them through the design process

• Videos to motivate and support learning

• Editable Google Slides STEM journal for distance learning

• STEM Career Connections and real-world examples

• Science handouts on pollination and types of bees

• Student recording sheet for each step of the process

• Math connection problems

Suggested Materials: Many different materials can be used for this challenge. Here are some suggestions that worked well for our students.

• cereal boxes

• soda can boxes

• cardboard

• disposable cups

• empty water bottles

• tin cans

• paper grocery bags

• small & large paper straws

• string or twine

• tape

• scissors

• construction paper

• Masking tape

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Looking for more STEM lessons? Find the Vivify resource guide here: bit.ly/VivifyResourceGuide

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