Bug Adventures

Hailey has been so interested in bugs lately that even though we have completed our units on butterflies and bees the bug observation continues. She happened to find a curious looking moth yesterday outside of our front door. After doing a little searching online we found that it was a Sphinx moth.



My first encounter with a Sphinx moth was actually during the day at my mother's house. I remember looking at this odd creature that looked to be a mix between a bee, butterfly, and hummingbird. It had the coloration of a bee, was drinking nectar from flowers, and hovering with its fast beating wings like a hummingbird. Needless to say, we were stumped as to what this creature could be. It was not until Hailey became interested in bugs over the past few months that I finally found the name for this unique creature!



The moth that Hailey found yesterday was of a different subfamily of sphinx moths - macroglossinae subfamily, xylophanes tersa. We found a website that is currently categorizing all sphinx moths (also known as hawk moths) county by county across the states as well as throughout the Americas. We checked our county, but found no active listings. After checking the more populous county to our north we found a picture of our moth. Apparently this particular type of moth is fairly common in our area. We then decided to submit our own pictures as well as our county to the site to aid in their research compilation project.



We received a return email stating that Hailey's finding would be posted on the site, activating the webpage for our county and giving credit to Hailey for the find. You can see it here. Hailey was ecstatic!

Bee Unit Study

Continuing on our theme of insects we moved to bees as our next subject for unit study. Since we already had a thorough understanding of butterflies, learning the anatomy of a bee was pretty straightforward. I thought that Wikipedia had a pretty good anatomy of a bee diagram, but we also found one to label yourself at Enchanted Learning, and another great one on the "How Stuff Works" website.

We were fortunate enough to get two different bee downloads for free this summer. One from Hands of a Child that contained all the research information in one handy area and one specifically on honeybees from Notebooking Nook that contained 14 mini-books to use in your lapbook. We used both of these, but I must say that the freebies from Homeschoolshare on bees were wonderful additions!

Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate a beekeeper nearby so we could visit, but we did do some backyard observations. While I haven't yet gotten around to it I am planning to order some honeycomb for the kids to examine. They usually sell it in 4 inch sections. The great part is that after they are done examining the honeycomb they get to eat the honey. I have read that you can either drain the honey and enjoy it in the usual way or simply take a bite of the honeycomb and chew it kind of like gum until the honey taste is gone.

In addition to the loads of books from the library I was also able to borrow a copy of a PBS NOVA movie called Tales from the Hive. It was an incredible up close look into the hive of a honeybee. It was great to see things like the bee dance, hierarchy of the hive, and how the queen bee is chosen as if you were actually there! I would highly recommend looking for this video if you are planning a bee study of your own.

I thought it would be cute to make the lapbook in bee colors. We took foam paper and cut strips to glue to the outside and made lines with black marker on the inside to match. I found the clipart for the beehive here. Hailey finished it off with some of her own artwork.



The first side of our lapbook includes the types of bees that live in a hive, I copied pictures from a library book to place on each page. The anatomy of a bee diagram was from wikipedia. The bottom of the folder has the lifecycle wheel and bee predators (robber fly, birds, spiders, praying mantis). On the right side is a book that has a list of all of the different jobs that a worker bee has in the hive throughout their lives.



The second side of the lapbook has a book on social bees (honeybees and bumblebees) and solitary bees (mason bees, leafcutter bees, etc) and a flap book on the dances that a worker bee when she has found a source of nectar. I had Hailey draw a picture of the direction that the bees would go after observing the bee dances under each flap. The left flap shows a pocket full of bee vocabulary words and on the right flap is the pocket holding our bee observation charts.

Butterfly Unit Study

Oh boy! This was so much fun. Hailey has recently shown such an interest in bugs that I wanted to integrate it into her schoolwork. We had purchased a bug collection kit for her and she seems to be out everyday looking for new things to examine. She has a butterfly net for catch and release observation, and a insect mounting kit for those bugs that have already expired.

I figured that butterflies would be a great place to start on our insect study. We started out at the library and checked out about 15 different books about butterflies. I found some great pictures on the anatomy of a butterfly here. This really helped us understand the intricacies of how a butterfly works.

We also utilized materials from Homeschool Share and a Hands of a Child Project pack that we downloaded for free this summer.

Once we had learned the anatomy fairly well (and had demonstrated such by drawing pictures on the patio with sidewalk chalk) we decided it was time for a field trip. I found a local butterfly farm here in Florida and we  went and wandered around their gardens for a while and questioned the folks that worked there for a while. We left the proud keepers of 5 newly hatched painted lady butterfly caterpillars. These folks will ship butterflies to surrounding states just check their website to see if there are any restrictions for your area.

While we were at the butterfly farm we also learned that the University of Florida had a huge butterfly exhibit. Of course we had to visit! It was very much worth the drive. They had a bountiful array of dried and mounted moths and butterflies from around the world as well as a huge screened in live butterfly exhibit featuring some butterflies we would probably never have been fortunate enough to see otherwise, such as the blue morpho and the owl butterfly.

I think the highlight of the Butterfly Exhibit was actually the hatching center where there were rows of chrysalises with several breaking open to reveal new butterflies drying their wings. It was a perfect precurser to the metamorphosis of the painted lady caterpillars that we had just brought home a couple of days prior.

This unit study was fun for the whole family!

This front cover show a collage of pictures that we took at the University of Florida Butterfly Exhibit.

Inside show the anatomy of a butterfly and the anatomy of the butterfly proboscis from here. The butterfly cards pocket contains the pictures and names of butterflies from Homeschool Share. The right flap shows a pocket with butterfly anatomy quiz cards - each butterfly has a different part of anatomy colored in and the back shows the name of the part. The flap book show the different butterfly habitats and what makes each unique.

The second side of the folder shows a lifecycle wheel of the butterfly from egg to adult, predators of a butterfly, butterfly defense mechanism, a visual demonstration of how many eggs are likely to survive per 100 layed, picture of monarch butterfly emerging from chrysalis, and a pocket containing the metamorphosis stages of a butterfly. The right flap contains a flower book with different plants that butterflies use as nectar plants.