Half a Hundred Acre Wood

Christian homeschooling integrating Classical and Charlotte Mason principles

I receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post. Please see our full disclosure policy for more details. Thank you for supporting Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood through your purchases.

About a year ago, we moved to our dream home – a secluded property in a hollow with creeks & rock outcroppings – a beautiful and serene place that we have affectionately named “Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood” (in honor of one of the greatest philosophers of all time).  When we moved here, the home had been vacant for a few years.  But as winter…

faded into spring…

… we realized that it hadn’t really been vacant at all.  In fact, the wasps and bees started to come out of the woodwork (inside and outside), and as our nice pest control company rep stated, “It’s a small price to pay for the home of your dreams, Mrs. Ferrell.”  (Yes, this is my favorite quote of all time.  In fact, my husband uses it any time something goes wrong – like when the spring dried up and we had no water, for example…  )

Thus, the Battle of the Bees and the Wasp Wars had begun.  Yes, it’s taking a while to break the cyle here.  But instead of just battling them, we have decided to do what any crazy homeschooling family would do – we study these neat little insects before we whack them with the badminton racquet.  But you won’t find pictures of the boys cuddling up with these little creatures. Actually, the only pictures I’ve taken of wasps are of dead ones.  Despite the fact that I am a bit skittish around them, we have ventured out (well, actually in) to learn more about these insects.  We’ll split this up into a couple of posts, mainly because I wanted to find a vacant wasp nest so that we can cut it open.  🙂

So, what have we learned thus far?

Carpenter Bees

Not all bees live in colonies.  Carpenter bees drill tiny tunnels in which they raise their young.  These tunnels are made in the pith of sumac, elder, or raspberry, or in our case, the pine logs that make up the walls of our home.  During the summer, this narrow tunnel is made into a little bee apartment complex, with the tunnel partitioned off with one egg laid per apartment.

How do they build the tunnel?
The bee digs out a perfectly round hole and then turns 90 degrees and drills a tunnel with her mouth (this process is very loud – it sounds like a drill!).  Then she gathers pollen and packs it in the bottom of the cell, lays a tiny egg, somehow glues sawdust together with her saliva to make a partition about 1/10-inch thick, and fastens it to the sides of the tunnel.  Then she repeats this process until she fills the tunnel with up to 14 eggs.  She leaves a little room for herself at the entrance to await the emergence of her offspring.
What happens after a bee grub hatches?
The egg in the deepest cell hatches first, feasting on the yummy bee bread (made of pollen and honey) left by their dear mother. After emerging from the pupa stage, it tears down the partition to join the next bee, which in turn tears down the next partition, and so on, until they all emerge together as adult bees. Just as brothers and sisters have to be patient with their younger siblings, these bees have to not only wait for the younger bees to go through this process, but they also have to put up with the little fragments of the partition being thrown into their faces. They pass these fragments back like a little assembly line so that the pieces collect at the bottom of the tunnel.  The mother bee stays true to her post, awaiting the day she meets her little family face-to-face.
The whole reason we whack these fascinating little creatures
is because of this.  Why can’t they go and find a plant else-
where?  I really want them to pollinate and enjoy their little fam-
ilies.  But I also don’t want our house to look like Swiss cheese.
Our references for this post have been the following FREE pdf resources:
Anna Botsford Comstock’s The Big Handbook of Nature Study  Pages 439-441 (or page 134-136 in Part 4 of the version offered by the Erskine family)
Margaret Williamson’s First Book of Bugs  Page 39
Albert Tibbets’s First Book of Bees Page 59


By 1 Comment Tagged With: , , , ,