“In biology, nothing is clear, everything is complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off another layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.” ― Richard Preston
Guest Speaker:. Erika Thompson
Presentation Times: TBD
Erika Thompson is the Founder and Owner of Texas Beeworks. As a child, she was fascinated with insects and spent her nights and weekends in her backyard in Houston, TX collecting every bug and critter she could find. She took a beekeeping class in 2011, with no intention of becoming a beekeeper, but simply because she wanted to learn more about honeybees as a species. She walked away from the class enamored with bees and started her first hive in her backyard in central Austin.
As her admiration for honeybees grew, so did her number of hives. She started Texas Beeworks in 2014, while also working a full-time, fast-paced job as a Communications Director. After five years of doing beework on weekends, nights, and even lunch breaks, she quit her office job to become a full-time beekeeper and hasn’t looked back. Her work with honeybees and her advocacy efforts to protect pollinators has been featured by the Austin American Statesman, Austin Monthly Magazine, and every local news station in Austin. She was even asked by the game show Jeopardy to help create a clue category about bees, which they filmed as video clues at the Texas Beeworks headquarters in Austin.
Hands-on Activities - Stations run continuously from 10am-2pm
People Pellets - Create a no-bake food pellet that would provide humans with balanced nutrition and energy to survive during a natural disaster. Choose a grain, protein, energy and flavor ingredient, then taste-test your people pellet!
Water Striders - Ever wonder how water striders can skip across the surface of water--and why? Learn about water striders and how their H20 athletics help them survive. Build your own water strider to take home and test its water-skipping skills!
Got Immunity? Game - Game will run at 10:30am, 11:30am, 12:30pm & 1:30pm; at least 10 participants needed per game
Inspired by musical chairs, this game will have you dodging germs! Learn how diseases are spread and how the transmission of some can be prevented.
Learning Labs
Kinder-2nd Grade - Build an Edible Cell, 10:30 am, lasts 45 minutesSmall but strong, cells are amazing! Get an up-close look at plant and animal cells -- what do they have in common and how are they different? Find different cell structures and learn what they do. Then use what you discover to build an edible model of an animal cell.
3rd-5th Grade - Oh Deer! Food Chain Game, 11:30 am, lasts 60 minutesIn this fast-paced food chain game, you’ll need to find food, water and shelter -- but is there enough to go around? Oh Deer! We’ll chart the data from each round we play and look for patterns. How do limited resources affect populations in an ecosystem?
6th-12th Grade - CSI Entomology, 1 pm, lasts 60 minutesJoin a specialized forensics team to investigate wildlife deaths. Your clues? Insects! Examine simulated maggots collected from a fictional animal body to piece together when the death occurred. Can your team uncover whether foul play was involved?