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Sweet Honey

The document discusses how honey is made and collected by bees. It explains that honey bees were introduced to Australia and native bees only produce small amounts of honey. It also notes that honey used to be a luxury in early Western Australia. The document includes information about beekeeping tools and harvesting honey.

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Portia Lorraine Lewis
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
58 views

Sweet Honey

The document discusses how honey is made and collected by bees. It explains that honey bees were introduced to Australia and native bees only produce small amounts of honey. It also notes that honey used to be a luxury in early Western Australia. The document includes information about beekeeping tools and harvesting honey.

Uploaded by

Portia Lorraine Lewis
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SWEET HONEY

HASS, Technologies, Science

Where does our honey come from?

Students will:
• Understand how honey is made and collected.
• Appreciate the value of honey in the past.
• Gather relevant information from a video (and a newspaper article)

ENGAGE

• Do you like honey?


• How do we use honey? (eg. on toast, in recipes, candles, in cosmetics…)

You might like to start the lesson by offering students some honey biscuits or honey on toast!

EXPLORE

Watch a video about how bees make honey. Get students to make a list of at least three interesting facts.

EXPLAIN

• The bees in the video, which give us the honey we see in the supermarkets
today, are European honey bees. They were introduced to Australia.
• Australian native bees only produce small amount of honey. Harvesting
large amounts of honey from native hives – especially in cooler part of
Australia – can weaken or even kill the nest.
• Honey used to be a real luxury in the early days of the Swan River Colony. It
took several months to bring honey over from England by boat, or several
weeks from over east. It was very difficult to establish a bee-keeping
industry here because many of the bees didn’t survive the long sea journey
from England. Discuss what sorts of foods might not have been available in
the Colony at the time (eg. honey cereal, honey yoghurt, honey and soy
chicken, hokey pokey ice cream etc).
• For older students, you can show an article from the 1841 Perth Gazette.
Discuss unfamiliar words and then get students to identify the facts
contained in the article.

EXTEND

Watch a video about how honey is harvested.

Get students to sort out the tools and equipment that beekeepers might use
from those that they wouldn’t, using the worksheet provided.

Show students beekeeper’s clothing, and ask if they can suggest reasons for its
features (eg. thick, loose fabric which sting can’t get through, net to keep bees
off the face, buttons on sleeves to stop bees getting up into the sleeve, sock-like
covering over shoes/bottom of trouser leg).

Discuss: why would an area like Toodyay make a great place for honey farming?

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


EVALUATE AND REFLECT

Show students a photo of a person scraping the wax off honey comb.

• Think about the honey making process: Can you recognise what is
happening in this picture? What would the beekeeper have done just
before/just after this photo was taken?

WANT TO DO MORE?

• Watch a video about Indigenous people harvesting and eating honey from native honey bees, and get students to identify
the difference between European and native bees.

USEFUL RESOURCES

• Information about beekeeping today. https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/small-landholders-western-australia/beekeeping-small-


landholders-western-australia

• CSIRO guide to native bees. https://blog.csiro.au/can-you-beelieve-our-guide-to-native-bees/

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL. (1841, July 17). The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal
(WA : 1833 - 1847), p. 2.
National Library of Australia http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article642978

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


Bee keepers uniform
Shire of Toodyay local history collection 2001.876a-e

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


WHICH ITEMS WOULD A BEEKEEPER USE?

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


WHICH ITEMS WOULD A BEEKEEPER USE? ANSWERS

 Knife for scraping wax off  Smoker  Shoe stretchers


the honeycomb

 Oil lamp  Beehive  honey extractor

 Rope maker  Coffee grinder  Compass

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay


Shire of Toodyay local history collection 2001.1219

© Writilin for Shire of Toodyay

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