Lower secondary school students’ knowledge and understandings of bees

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ABSTRACT Bees play a pivotal role in maintaining ecosystems and securing food for humankind. As such, it is crucial to shape a scientific understanding of bees for school students at a young age so as to value and protect the little creatures. This study is intended to identify teenage students’ knowledge and understandings of bees in relation to structures, behaviours, functions, threatening factors and loss of bees, via interviews and a drawing test which were administered to a total of 73 seventh-graders from two classes in a lower secondary school. The findings reveal that some drawn bees’ external structures are most often missing, misplaced and erroneously quantified, suggesting a lack of holistic knowledge of bees’ external structures. A majority of students tend to equate bees with social bees and some barely conceive the messages that certain behaviours of bees communicate. Anthropomorphism is commonly used in representing and formulating their understandings of bees. Students’ statements demonstrate that some unproved and insubstantial factors are deemed as a threat to bees and that their anticipations of the impacts of bee loss are characterised by immediacy and directness. Based on these findings, the sources of their misconceptions and misunderstandings as well as some implications are illuminated in relation to bee teaching in biological education.