Hands-on Activity to Learn about Pollination

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After learning about flower parts, we learned about pollination. My son is afraid of bees since he was stung by wasps when he was younger. He doesn’t want to be close to any bees. So I made a cut-out bee and experimented with how pollination occurs.

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What We Used

• Printed Bee image (I found bee’s image from the internet and printed the size of my son’s hand)
• Cardstock thick paper (or you might be able to use construction paper instead)
• Scissors
• Glue
• 2 flower petal cut out made of construction paper (I used pink)
• 2 Facial cotton pads or cotton balls
• 2 small Cups
• Cheetos or any snacks with orange powdered seasoning is on (like Doritos)

How We Did

We watched this video first and learned about pollination.

I found the bee’s image from the internet and printed it out. Then I glued it on cardstock paper. As you can see, when I cut it out, I made two holes below the bee’s legs so that my son could hold the bee cut-out like his fingers are the bee’s legs.

Then I cut out pink construction paper like a flower petal. (I made two) After setting the small cup on the petal, I filled some Cheetos as stamen in a small cup. Also, I put a facial cotton pad as a pistil on the top of Cheetos. (I made two sets of these flowers)

After we set two Cheetos flowers, we started the experiment.

Let’s picture this cut-out bee is working on the flower. Maybe it is getting some nectar.

Then the bee is about to fly from one flower to another. (pink one to blue one in the picture)

The bee landed on the other flower and moved around.

It was so fun, and we saw how pollination works. We enjoyed all Cheetos after the activity as our snack.

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Resources for Learning Topics

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Videos

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Websites

Flower Seeking Pollinators (by California Academy of Sciences)

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Happy learning!