Have a Sweet New Year with Honey Fun Facts

 

• It is a tradition on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to eat apples or challah dipped in honey as a wish for a sweet new year.
• In the Torah, Israel is called “the land of milk and honey,” because its climate is ideal for grazing animals and growing flowers.
• People have collected honey from bees since prehistoric times. In Tel Rehov archeologists found clay beehives which are over 3000 years old!
• In Israel today, there are more than 90,000 beehives in over 6,000 locations around the country. Most of the honey they produce is sold at Rosh Hashanah time.
• To make one pound (half a kilogram) of honey, bees must collect nectar from two million flowers.

Excerpted from What's The Buzz? Honey for a Sweet New Year by Allison Ofanansky and photographed by Eliyahu Alpern.

Visit a bee farm, and follow the bees, as they carry “kisses” from flower to flower, and return to their hives with their tummies full of nectar. Learn how the honey is extracted from the combs and makes its way from the hive to the table, to be enjoyed with slices of apples for a Rosh Hashanah treat.

Teachers: Plan Ahead for Rosh Hashanah Events

In What’s the Buzz: Honey for a Sweet New Year, learn how the honey is extracted from the combs and makes its way from the hive to the table, to be enjoyed with slices of apples for a Rosh Hashanah treat from the perspective of a young Israeli girl on a class field trip.

Unique Rosh Hashanah program ideas for your school: This book offers cross-curricular tie-ins with science, including: studying insects such as bees, the recent threat to the bee population (called colony collapse disorder) as well as the benefits of symbiosis. Students can visit a bee farm or schools can invite a beekeeper to speak to an assembly.

This book is the third in Kar-Ben’s “Nature in Israel” series, and can be part of student learning about Israel, including its terrain and habitat and why it is called the land of milk and honey!