🐝 Realistic Bee Puppets 🐝

🐝These cute bee puppets are a very quick and simple craft to make! They are also useful for decor, and look amazing placed as picks in a bouquet of fresh flowers.🌻

As a birthday gift, my son requested 3 bees placed in fresh flowers; he liked the bees so much that he and his sister requested to make more the following day to use as fun sticks puppets! Together, they had a lovely time flying their bees around the kitchen tables and helping the bees gather pollen and drink nectar from the fresh flowers.

If you do not have fresh flowers, artificial flower replicas, or even hand-drawn and colored, or paper flowers can work well to produce a very similar learning activity to the one mentioned above!

Though simple, this project has some great educational aspects! My kiddos are currently quite fascinated with bees out in our yard. To tie with their interest in bees and our bee unit study, we specifically selected bee images that looked realistic. 🐝 😊

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🐝 SUPPLIES USED:

• Public Domain Bee Images (we chose as realistic looking images as possible; this looks best with a side view picture of a bee. My kiddos also wanted the bees to have some pollen gathered on its legs.)
• Skewer Sticks (or popsicle sticks, small dowels, or natural sticks/small branches from outdoors can be used; pretty much anything study enough to hold the bee upright will work) 🙂
• Glue stick (regular liquid glue can cause the image to bubble; I prefer the glue stick for this activity, unless the image is printed directly onto cardstock, in which case the glue is far less likely to cause bubbling on the paper)
• Scissors (These scissors were gifted to me by my Auntie and are my very favorite brand of craft scissors; they are sharp, work well for fine detailed cuts, and are quite durable; having given me over 5 years of heavy use so far!)
• White Cardstock (this is the brand that we use most; we used 80lb for this project)
• Printer paper (this option is only needed if printer cannot print on thick card-stock!)
• Yellow Craft Foam (chip board might also work as an alternative)
• Tape (or Hot glue) to secure the stick to the back of the bee puppet. I recommend hot glue for securing stick if planning to use bees as puppets; otherwise, if just using as decor, tape should be fine.

🐝Now, to begin making this fun and easy craft!🐝😊

First, we printed some (free) public domain images of bees onto regular printer paper. (*Note that If your printer is able to print onto thick card-stock, this option can be skipped; just print the images directly onto the cardstock!)

(To find public domain images of bees, I just did a google search. If you would like an exact copy of the bee image that we used, feel free to send me an email, here, and I will send a PDF of the image to you).

We cut the bees out of the paper; leaving a large area of white paper around them.

*Next, we glued the bees onto white, card-stock paper.

Cutting the bees out of the card-stock (still leaving a white space around the entire bee), we glued them onto a thin piece of yellow foam.

(Applying the card-stock to foam is optional; we only did it because we loved the added color and dimension it gave to our bees. If you want to get super fancy, flip your image around (mirror setting in editing software) and print; pasting the two mirrored sides together with the stick in between.)

After allowing the glue to dry for a couple hours, we carefully cut the bees out of the foam and applied a stick to the back of each bee. For the “stick” we used 12 inch skewer sticks originally meant for cooking/kitchen use; I simply cut the sharp point off each skewer and cut it down to our desired length.

We used tape to secure the skewer stick to the back of these bees, but much prefer hot glue for a more secure and long lasting application!

🌻 Since NT had specifically requested 3 bees in fresh flowers for his birthday, we placed these 3 bees directly into our flower pot, which just so happened to have a bee theme on it (a wedding present to my Hubby and I from Dear Friends)! 🌻🐝

🐝It has been a couple months since we have made these bees, and they are still around and being used (destined to end up in the kids’ personal scrapbooks, one day soon!).

🌻 Eventually, the tape did detach from the skewers (due to lots of play), but the kids ended up happily playing with the bees even without the sticks!🐝

🐝I love that this project can be suited to a variety of age groups! As an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed this project; finding it a great way to add a little something special to flower arrangements! 🌻 I can definitely see myself repeating variations of this fun little craft in years to come! 😊🌻

🐝I hope that this post inspires you to want to make fun little puppets and/or flower picks of your own! 🐝💖

🐝Do you think that you will make these bee themed puppets? If so, how will do you it? Please feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts and ideas; we LOVE hearing from you! 😊

P.S. For more Bee themed projects and resources, see posts from our Bee Unit Study! 😊🐝