This summer two beekeepers in Hunan Province, China, competed to see who could attract the most bees.

The two men wore only shorts and had a queen bee attached to them to attract the bees. They stood on scales to weigh the bees they attracted.

The competition was won by Wang Dalin who attracted 26 kg of bees onto his body. His opponent, Lu Kongjiang, attracted 22.9 kg.

A bee weighs about 0.2 grams. How many bees do you think would have made the 26 kg?

A bee is roughly 12mm long and around 4mm high. Estimate how thick the layer of bees might be? Explain how you know.

It’s in the News! Bee Wear! Teacher Notes

Activity Bee wear! Description Prompts and probing questions Extension This resource is aimed at developing an understanding of estimation and proportion. Prompts and probing questions The PowerPoint offers two problems. The first is a simple proportion question, asking the students to explain how many bees would weigh 26 kg. The second problem is more complex and requires some assumptions and estimation to be made by the students. Some of the information they might need is given on the slide. Another piece of information they are likely to need is the ‘surface area’ of a person, which is approximately 1.9 m2 for an adult male. If you’d like your class to work out their own surface area, the Mosteller formula which calculates Body Surface Area (BSA) in m2, is: Other questions to ask about this situation might include: (after the first slide) what mathematical questions might you ask about this story? what information do you need to solve the problem? How would you find it out? how many bees do you think there are in this picture? How would you find out? how much ‘space’ would one bee take up? how many bees do you think would fit in a baked bean can? How could you estimate? How might you improve your estimate? Extension Given that the ‘surface area’ of a 12- to 13-year-old is 1.33m2, what weight of bees would an average year 8 student be able to attract? Would they be able to stand up with the extra weight? Assessment If you use the APP model of assessment then the areas to assess could include: solve word problems and investigations from a range of contexts (using and applying mathematics level 5) solve problems and carry through substantial tasks by breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks… give solutions to an appropriate degree of accuracy (using and applying mathematics level 6).