Early years activity: World Bee Day
Celebrate World Bee Day with this meaningful activity. Children use natural and recycled materials to build their very own bee hotel - a safe, cosy shelter for bees to rest and nest. Through exploring, making and doing something real for nature, children begin to understand why bees matter and how even the smallest actions can make a huge difference.
World Bee Day learning aims
- Children explore natural materials and begin to understand that bees are living things with needs, developing an early sense of care and responsibility for the environment
- Use new words in context — hollow, pollen, nectar, shelter etc.
- Children select and combine a range of natural and recycled materials with intentionality, developing fine motor skills and making meaningful creative choices.
Resources you will need for this activity
- Cardboard tubes (toilet rolls, kitchen rolls)
- A sturdy box or wooden tray
- Natural materials - sticks, pinecones, dried leaves, moss, bark
- Hollow bamboo canes or paper straws (cut to 10-15cm)
- String or wool
- PVA glue and brushes/sticks
- Child-safe scissors
- Magnifying glasses
- Sorting trays/containers
- Information about bees, e.g. non-fiction books or digital information, bee photos.
World Bee Day activity outline
- Invite children to help collect natural items such as sticks, leaves, small stones, moss from the outdoor area before the activity begins. Use magnifying glasses to look at them closely. Ask open questions, e.g. “What shelter would you need if you were very tiny?”, “Where do you think a bee might sleep?”
- Introduce World Bee Day. Share a few simple facts about bees - they live in hives and hollow spaces; solitary bees lay their eggs inside hollow stems; bees help flowers grow by carrying pollen from one flower to another. Show pictures of bee ‘hotels’. Follow the children’s questions and curiosity
- Sort and explore the materials. Lay everything out on sorting trays/containers. Give children time to handle, describe and organise the materials in their own way before any making begins. What feels rough? What is hollow? What might a bee like? This unhurried exploration builds vocabulary and supports children to make intentional choices when they come to build
- Build your own bee hotel. Give each small group a cardboard box or tray. Children choose materials and pack them inside, filling gaps with tubes, straws, sticks and moss. There is no right way to do it. Encourage children to make decisions, test what fits, and adjust as they go. Narrate what you observe: “You’ve left a hollow space there; a bee could sleep in that!”
- Decorate the hotel, such as children tying wool around tubes, gluing on natural decorations, or adding a hand-drawn label. If they’d like, invite them to give their bee hotel a name
- Using the bee information, identify where would be suitable places for the bee hotels and then find those places outside. Together, take the bee hotels outside and let children choose sheltered spots, for example, against a fence, tucked in a corner, near flowering plants. This moment is important - children are taking a real action for the natural world. Leave the bee hotels in place and return to them over the coming weeks, and see if the children notice any changes or visitors
- Reflect together. What did they make? Who is it for? Why do bees need our help? Capture children’s responses in their own words for your observations, for example, “What would you tell someone who didn’t know about bees?”
How to extend this activity
Bee Garden Map. Over the days that follow, invite children to create a large-scale collaborative map of your outdoor space; marking where the bee hotel lives, where flowers grow, and where bees have been spotted. This supports early mark-making with genuine purpose. You could even press some flowers and stick bee images on as collage elements. Display the map at child height so they can add to it as they observe new things.
NDNA products to support you with this activity
Outdoor and risky play outdoor training - Face to face training
Disclaimer: Activities with children must always be risk assessed, including for allergies or choking. Children must always have adequate supervision. Resources and materials must always be appropriate for children’s age and stage of development.
