March 19th, 2018

My goodness it's been busy in Manuka over the last few weeks.  We've had visitors come and share with us about their passions, and it's been so interesting for us to listen to and ask some questions!

We were really very lucky to have Brett Fairweather come and show us his moves!  He is the creator of Jump Jam and was SO excited to shake his groove thing with us.  We were lucky enough to have him share a new dance that he had just filmed ready for schools to use.  We really enjoyed joining in and showing him how clever we were!

Gemma McCaw is an olympic athlete and plays hockey for the Black Sticks, the New Zealand team.  She spoke to us about the importance of striving for excellence, which is one of our PRIDE values, the importance of trying your best and friendship.  Lots of us brought along our hockey sticks for her to autograph.  We are looking forward to watching her and her team mates play at the olympic games.

Garden to Table is one of our most favourite things to do and this term it was even more exciting.  James from Natural New Zealand Honey brought along some boxes of honey and some queen bees for us to look at.  He was pretty jolly impressed at what we knew about bees (but we are the Busy Bees of Manuka!) and we had LOTS of questions for him.  Did you know that a worker bee only lives for 6-8 weeks and makes about a teaspoon in it's lifetime, but a queen bee can live two years?  The frames full of honey were very heavy, and were dripping on the floor.  We were allowed to scoop out the honey with our fingers.  It was REALLY messy but such great fun.  

James showed us little tiny crates that had a queen bee and some worker bees in them.  The queen was bigger than the workers, and she had a blue dot painted on her back so that she was easy to find in the hive.  We learnt about the 'waggle' dance that bees do to tell each other about where the flowers are.  We also learnt how they can 'cook' a wasp if it comes into their hive to steal some honey.  They're pretty clever insects!