Celebrating World Bee Day with Megan Daley 🐝🌸

In honour of World Bee Day 2025, 20th May, we’re thrilled to share a special piece from author, teacher librarian, and beekeeper Megan Daley. Megan’s love for bees is deeply rooted in her childhood, from reading Winnie the Pooh to learning from her grandfather in the garden. In her blog post, she discusses her passion for pollinators, her journey into beekeeping, and why she wrote The Beehive — a story designed to inspire children to notice, appreciate, and care for bees in their own environments. 🐝🍯

Join us as Megan shares fascinating bee facts, practical tips for encouraging bees in your own garden, and insights into how we can all contribute to protecting these vital pollinators 🌿💛

What inspired you to write this story? 
I wanted to create a story about how easy it is to increase bee populations in schools and encourage everyone to have bees at home and in their educational settings. And I just love bees! 

What do you hope children will take away from this story? 

Understanding of the importance of pollinators, an interest in keeping an eye out for bees around them - I hope that all readers of my book, children and adults, will look for bees everywhere. 

What encouraged you to start keeping bees? 

About 75 per cent of our food crops rely on some pollination, so if we have declining bee numbers this will have a huge impact on our food security.  Its so easy to keep native bees and they are endlessly fascinating…it’s a small thing we can do to contribute to our local pollinator count.

When did you develop an interest in bees? 

It was actually reading Winnie the Pooh as a child, I loved that he loved bees and honey! Then my grandfather used to talk to me about bees when I gardened with him. When I was older I did Agriculture at school and joined the bee club, so I think I’ve always loved bees!

What do you love most about bees? 

I love how beautifully bees model to us as humans how to contribute to a community by working together and being collaborative - a colony of social bees like these little tetragonula carbonaria bees know their roles, they rely on everyone to do their bit, they communicate clearly, they trust that everyone is working for the good of the hive and they have a queen, a leader, but the workers bees make all the decisions. 

What is a fact about bees that most people aren’t aware of? 

Honeybees communicate in a dance language that we call the waggle dance. The scout bees return to the hive and they show the other bees where the best pollen or nectar is by doing a directional dance!  Some native Australian bees do a fascinating buzz pollination dance - where they hold onto the flowers with their mandibles and vibrate the flower to release pollen or in some cases bang their heads on a flower! The Blue banded bees bang their heads on a flower's anthers an amazing 350 times per second.

What can we do to encourage more bees in our school or home garden? 

Plant a diverse range of flowering plants - bees even love weeds or a lawn that has been left to grow and flower, have water sources for bees and other animals and don’t use pesticides. 

To find out more about ‘World Bee Day’ head to https://www.worldbeeday.org.au/