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How Bees Make Honey

3rd grade nonfiction passage about animals and food: 162 words, five questions, an answer key and vocabulary.

3rd grade nonfiction animals and food 162 words

How Bees Make Honey

A honey bee spends its days visiting flowers. It lands on a blossom and sips a sweet liquid called nectar. The bee stores the nectar in a special honey stomach, which is separate from the stomach it uses to digest food.

When the bee flies back to the hive, it passes the nectar to another bee. That bee chews it for a while and then spreads it into a six-sided wax cell. The nectar is still thin and watery at this point.

Worker bees then fan their wings over the cells. The moving air dries out the extra water. Slowly, the nectar thickens into honey. When the honey is ready, the bees seal the cell with a cap of wax.

Honey is the food the bees save for winter, when few flowers bloom. A single bee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its whole life. It takes a huge team of bees to fill a hive.

Questions

  1. What do honey bees collect from flowers? in the text

  2. Where does a bee carry the nectar on its way back to the hive? in the text

  3. How do worker bees turn watery nectar into thick honey? in the text

  4. Why do bees save honey? think about it

  5. What does the last paragraph suggest about how a hive works? think about it

Words to know

nectar
a sweet liquid inside flowers
hive
the home where a group of bees lives
cell
one small, six-sided room made of wax in a honeycomb
worker bee
a bee that does the daily jobs for the hive, like gathering food
blossom
a flower

How to use it

  1. Press Read it big (or B) to put the text on the projector, or Full screen (F) to fill the whole screen.
  2. Ask the questions one at a time and use Show answer when the class has decided. A shows or hides every answer.
  3. Print student copy for the class, or Print with answers for yourself.

Ideas for class

  • Before reading, put nectar, hive, cell, worker bee and blossom on the board with their meanings from the Words to know section and have students predict what the text will be about.
  • Read it aloud once while students follow along, then have them reread it alone or with a partner. At a calm 100 words a minute it takes about 2 minutes to read aloud.
  • Use the Read it big button (or B) to put the text on the projector, and Show answer on one question at a time so the class commits to an answer first.
  • Question 4 asks the reader to infer. Ask students to point to the words in the passage that led them to their answer.
  • Ask students to write one question the passage did not answer, then look for the answer in a book or on a classroom screen.
  • Print the student copy for independent work and keep the answer-key copy for yourself.

Related

Questions

What reading level is "How Bees Make Honey"?

It was written for 3rd grade. It has 162 words and works out to a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of about 4.6. That is a formula's estimate from sentence length and syllables, and it is not a Lexile or a guided reading level, so check it against your students.

What do the questions ask?

There are five. 3 ask for something the text says directly and 2 ask the reader to work something out from clues. Each has an answer in the key, and the answers are written as a teacher would accept them, not as the only possible wording.

How long does it take to read?

About 2 minutes read aloud at 100 words a minute. For a one-minute fluency check, paste it into the fluency timer and use the word count.

Can I print it?

Yes. Print student copy gives the passage, the questions with lines to write on, and the word meanings. Print with answers gives the same page with the answers filled in. Both are made in your browser.

Is this passage from a published book?

No. It was written for Peabody Teach, so there is no book to buy and no login to read it.

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