Afton State Park: Bee Program & Beach

Afton State Park, a set on Flickr.

Come for the bee program, stay for the long walk!

Afton State Park: Covered in BEES

Finn and I went over to Afton State Park, another metro-adjacent Minnesota gem. They were having bee activities, where you could learn all about bees and make a bee craft. Pipe cleaners and tissue paper to the rescue! As bees, and other pollinators, have been the talk of the environmental world lately due to their apparent decline and phenomena such as colony collapse, I thought this would be a good learning experience for both of us. We have many pollinators in our garden, including honey bees, but our butterfly population was almost nonexistent this summer.

As with much of the non-human natural world, it's easy to put our own cultural biases and observations on top of them, so it won't surprise you to know that I did some mumbling when she said that the Worker bees, who are all girls, do all the work, and can sting. Yeah, it's no wonder they sting, slaving away while the drones, well... The Queen lays all the eggs, and the Drones, who are male, are sex slaves. No stinger. Which is helpful in a sex slave. In the fall, Workers block the Drones from the hive, and they die. (Insert snarky comment here.)

It won't surprise anyone to know that if flowers don't have bees and other pollinators, they don't grow. Other pollinators are wasps, hornets, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Wasps differ from bees in that they don't have hairs, their wings are longer, and their bodies are longer. Also, honey bees can only sting once and then they die; wasps can sting many more times, as we learned to our misfortune one summer and fall when they were nesting under our siding and repeatedly getting into the house.

Currently, honey bees are under threat from colony collapse, mites, fungus, pesticides, and the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures like corn and soybeans that blanket miles and miles of the heartland of the United States.

This was set up at the upper picnic area, and you could come at any time during the designated time frame to learn and make your crafts. Near the parking lot and the picnic area is a nice meadow, and we walked through it looking for butterflies and other insects. We did see a few monarchs and numerous dragon flies. At the beach, we saw common blue butterflies, which over-populated my youth to the point that they became mundane, but now, I rarely see them, so this was a treat.


What you should know: There are pit toilets at the upper picnic area, where this event was staged. They are a few yards down the trail. In them, you can see numerous spider and spider-adjacent species.

There are trails and a beach, but the beach is quite a walk if you have a small child who will refuse to walk after a time. Make sure you have a printed map with you because the signs on the trails were rather confusing, and I wound up making a wrong turn that ended with me walking way too far, eventually in the glare of the hot sun, carrying almost forty pounds of whining child on my shoulders.