Honey taste testing activity to learn about bees

This honey taste testing activity was great fun for our whole family.

It arose when we did our bee unit study last spring and learned a bit honey, including how and why bees make it.

In a nutshell, the main food eaten by honey bees is nectar and pollen from flowers. However, bees in the larval stage eat honey. The worker bees in the hive collect nectar and convert it into honey that can be fed to the larvae (although the larvae chosen to become queens eat royal jelly rather than honey).

Not surprisingly, the flavor of the honey bees make will vary depending on the bees’ diet. So the particular flora in the area of the beehive will influence the taste of the honey that is produced.

We decided to set up a honey taste testing activity to see just how much the flavor of honey is influenced by the flora near a beehive, and also to determine which flavor we liked best.

Note: You’ll find more resources for learning about bees and other insects on my Insects Unit Study page.

For this activity, I bought four different flavors of raw honey from our grocery store: avocado, pine, sage, and wild raspberry.

Right away we noticed color differences between the different flavors of honey, as the wild raspberry honey was much lighter in color than the other flavors.

We used craft sticks to dip into the honey and pick up a bit to taste.

We tried each flavor in turn.

Yum! The kids LOVED this activity! We savored each taste and tried the flavors multiple times to compare them.

This was a great, Montessori-style sensory activity that really required the kids to focus on the sensations in their mouths.

In the end, we all noted big differences in taste between the different honey flavors. We all liked the wild raspberry and most of us also liked the avocado. But the pine and sage honeys had strange flavors we were not fans of.