photo: Nancy Coddington Did you know that about a third of the U.S. diet comes from foods that involve pollination by honey bees? Since bees provide vital benefits to people, including crop pollination, and products such as honey and beeswax, the loss of bee colonies through colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a serious concern.
In this lesson plan from The Nature Conservancy, students learn about the features of a honeybee colony and the potential causes of CCD. The activity puts students at the cutting edge of scientific research because to date, CCD has not been reliably attributed to any single cause. By the end of the lesson, students should understand that in nature, simple cause/effect relationships may not explain all of our observations. In this way, students learn that science is an investigative process, not simply a way to describe nature. EXPLORE: https://to.pbs.org/1K7ShVsAdditional Resources: Nature, Silence of the Bees NOVA, Tales of the Hive