What a fun week we had! Co-op had two awesome days this week, one to explore mason bees more and one to visit Drift Creek Falls, a fun waterfall hike near the coast. We also played so many board games this week, and started our plans for our year long science projects.
Our first day of co-op this week we went to another families house. They have a no-spray berry farm and live just a bit from us, and have a mason bee habitat in their yard! After having mason bee homes for many years they discovered cleaning the tubes helps the population percentages grow much faster than leaving them to fend for themselves. Mason bee males hatch first, then start pollinating early blooming plants in February and March. The females hatch second and start to mate, and then start to find places to lay their eggs. The hallow tubes a wood pecker has made in a tree, underground burrows left from a worm or snake, and other long holes in nature are where they would naturally nest. These tubes placed in special boxes are a man- made nest to encourage mason bees to help pollinate early spring plants and fruits in backyard gardens, and our friends berry farm! The female alternates packing in mud, then pollen, then lays an egg, then more dirt, pollen, and another egg....until the tube is full. She lays female eggs first in the tube, and male eggs last, so the males can hatch out first. This happens in the mid to late spring, and then the eggs hatch, eat the pollen, and go through their larva and pupa stages until they are a fully formed bee at the end of winter. Then the males chew their way out of the packed mud and get to pollinating! By opening the tubes and removing the bee cocoons, we eliminate issues such as the mud being too dry or too hard packed for them to chew their way out, keep predators from chewing the mud out and eating them before they can develop and fly away, and also keeps mold from growing in the hives. Our friend had a special mason bee house, it looked like a bird house but had two levels, the top was a place to put new tubes for next years eggs, and the bottom was completely closed in except a small hole. She removed the face plate on the bee box, pours the mason bee cocoons inside, and then in the early spring the bees awaken as temperatures start to raise, and then fly out the tiny hole.
The larger, gray fuzzy things are the mason bee cocoons. The yellow plugs are pollen for them to eat. You can also see maggots of some sort, we are not sure if these are underdeveloped mason bee larva that died before spinning their cocoons or some sort of bug that made it into the tubes. The teeny black specks we think was bee poop.
We spent a lot of time playing board games this week! The boys played Minecraft Builders and Biomes, a strategy game where you build your biomes from tiles on the table to get the most diverse selection of biomes. We have started to pull a game a week from the big box of Simply Fun games we purchased this year, and this weeks game was Spell Trek! A little easy for the older two, a little hard for the youngest, it was a fun game to practice our spelling while your safari truck races through the jungle to the finish. Avery took it with him on his weekend at Grammy's house and played with his younger cousins as well. Kingdomino is a strategy game where you select different tiles to create your kingdom, having to strategically place tiles to connect land types to gain the most points; almost like a easier version of Carcassonne. Mad Dragon is a emotional development game we played that plays like uno, but you have to answer questions about how to handle emotional or angry moments. Sushi Go is one of our favorite quick math games, matching sushi types and practicing multiplication. The boys played many hours of DnD this week with Avery leading a campaign. John and I were gone over the weekend and Super Nanny stayed with the older two, while we were gone they played: Citadels, Just One (a writing game), and Harry Potter Trivia.
On Thursday we visited Drift Creek Falls! It rained heavily the entire day! We were soaked, and tired, and several members of our party were very grumpy by the time we finished the four mile hike and made it back to the car.
We started planning our big science projects for the year! Michael wants to build a working wind mill that will actually charge a battery when the wind blows. Emmet would like to design and build multiple natural shelters in our woods and test them for durability and water proofing. Avery has decided to try and make rafts from natural elements, and would like to make one big enough to hold a duck so we can go float it on a pond and create a nesting site for ducks. We worked on writing out supply lists and drawing a sketch of the final project.
Spelltrek has been a hit here!
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