Station A: Identify Your Hive. This first station divides the class into "colonies."
The task is to take a cotton ball that has been scented with one of 4 to 6 scents (vanilla, lemon, peppermint, etc. depending on the size of the group) and each child goes around to the various "hives" to see if their scent (pheromone) matches the hive scent. Prior to the start of this task random students are selected to act as "guard bees" at each of the hive entrances. Once all students have a cotton ball, they go up to a "guard bee" at any of the various “hives” and present their cotton ball for smelling. They are either turned away or accepted based on the scent. Once everyone has found their hive, they will go to each of the other stations in that colony group. An adult supervises this station and offers a small jar with coffee grounds inside for the guard bees to smell from time to time to "reset" their noses as the smelling of the scents will fatigue their noses quickly and the adult at each "hive" can help to ward off false positives due to olfactory fatigue! Also the adult can help to select additional guard bees from newly accepted bees to speed up the process if it is taking too much time to get the colonies set up. 5-7 min. After all the colonies are established, they will move to the various numbered stations based on their colony number, e.g., Colony #1 will go to Station #1 and Colony #2 will go to Station #2 etc.
