Printable Life Cycle of a Bee Layer Book

Each spring and summer (and, to be honest, most of the year if you live someplace that has mild winters and long summers) you and your children probably see lots of bees! One of my children has always been rather afraid of bees, so I thought maybe a fun study about bees would be a way to help her feel like they aren’t “bad guys.” This Life Cycle of a Bee Layer Book is a great way to get started learning about bees with your children.

This printable is a simple layer book all about the life cycle of bees. Each page includes an image and notebooking lines for your child to write down facts about bees or about the specific stage listed on the page. There are pages for eggs, larva (three stages), pupa, and adult bees. For younger children, I would suggest removing two of the three larva pages so they can write just one fact instead of three.

Some Resources for Kids About Bees

Websites

BrainPOP Honeybees – In this BrainPOP movie, Tim and Moby take your children into the world of honeybees! Your children will discover what makes honeybees different from other bees, about the body structure of honeybees, the different kinds of jobs honeybees have, and how these bees work together to keep their hives alive and well.

Life Cycle of Bees – This site has information for your child to learn about the honeybee life cycle: stages, phases, and reproduction.

Life Cycle Model

Honeybee Life Cycle Model – This honeybee life cycle model includes egg, larva, pupa, and adult honey bee.

Books

There are SO many good books about bees! It was hard to choose just a few suggestions!

I Am a Bee is for children from preschool through about first grade. It teaches children the importance of bees in the world.

National Geographic Readers: Bees is for children of about grades kindergarten through third grade. It is full of beautiful photos and information that is perfect for kids to read for themselves.

The Bee Book explores the secret world of bees: how they live, how they work, how they support each other, and their hive. Includes information about how much bees matter, why they are declining, and what you can do to help.

Bee: A Peek-Through Picture Book allows children to peek through a hole in the book’s cover to to see how bees contribute to the beauty of the environment, pollinate flowers, work in their beehive, and more!

The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees is for older children, teens, and adults. It is a great introduction to about 4,000 bee species found in the United States and Canada. It includes color photos, essential information for identifying different bee species, and information about how they live and how to attract them to your own yard

If you want to extend your study to gardening and insects, we have even more resources to share with you! (And then you can click the link at the bottom of this post to get your Life Cycle of a Bee Layer Book.)

This article, Teaching Children About Garden Bugs (and Natural Pesticide Recipes), includes simple but useful photos and information about 5 common garden pests and how to prevent (or get rid of) them.

Gardening can be especially fun when it includes building your own ladybug house! After all, ladybugs are known for eating “bad” insects such as aphids, scale insects, and plant mites. So build this ladybug house to put in your garden to encourage ladybugs to live there and help you take care of your garden.

These Life of an Insect Notebooking Pages are perfect for using with your study of all kinds of insects! You can use them if you dive more deeply into your study of bees or if you choose to study ladybugs or any other kind of insect this spring or summer!

This garden journal for children includes pages for planning your garden’s layout, plants and seeds to buy, keeping track of planting and harvesting dates, recording information about garden pests, and even taste testing once crops are harvested!