I Will Teach You How to Pet the Bumblebees
“I will teach you how to pet the bumblebees.”
That line always grabs their attention. I’ve been using it now for about 15 years in AP Environmental Science. Lately, I’ve used it in Botany too. It’s a second-day-of-school line—after the first day fluff, but before the breakneck pace of fall sets in. Usually on day three, sometimes day four, we head outside. I do not yet know everyone’s name.
We go outside because we can. This is Waubonsie Valley. We have our own ecosystem. It exists because we created it. We created it because we could and because we should. It’s a tallgrass prairie reconstruction that students started planting in 2001.
In 2006, I started teaching at Waubonsie High School. That year, like several years before it, and each spring since, we reclaimed a new section of prairie. Now it’s 2025 and, by public high school standards, the prairie is huge: about a dozen acres, give or take, laid down like a ribbon along a linear mile. It is magnificent.
Now, back to the bumblebees. I have to tell the kids the day before to remember to bring their EpiPens if they have a bee allergy. In 15 years, I’m the only one to ever get stung, and it was by a yellowjacket. Go figure. Still, I have to tell them, and someone always asks why.
“Because there’s probably a thousand bees where we’re going.”
The brave students pet them too. Many of the students are brave.
This inevitably sparks a wave of excited chatter. What did we sign up for? What they don’t realize, because nobody ever teaches this to them before they reach my classroom, is that all of those bees are harmless. Even the huge, brown, solitary wasps, which live in burrows under our prairie, have no interest in us. And the bumblebees are oblivious. So oblivious, in fact, that I can pet their fuzzy little backs with impunity as they crash into flower after flower. The brave students pet them too. Many of the students are brave. Petting bumblebees on day three of AP Environmental Science (Enviro) sets the tone for the rest of the year.
Of course, without this huge prairie in our school’s back yard, there would be no bumblebees to pet. Before 2001 this was an impossible experience at Waubonsie Valley (WV). Environmental Science at WV used to be much like it is at any other suburban high school in Chicagoland: fieldwork meant field trips, which meant a bus and a brown lunch bag. That is still the reality for the other two high schools in my district.
In some sense, WV won the geographic lottery. Immediately adjacent to the school is Fox Valley Park District land, full of natural-ish areas. There’s the creek: half of it has eroded banks, and the other half was hollowed out and deepened in the 1970s for flood control, when our high school and the nearby subdivision were built. There’s also the hill with the bumblebees. When they hollowed out and widened the creek, all that dirt had to go somewhere. That somewhere became Eola Hill, and it is the backdrop to our stadium and student parking lot. It is half of our home cross-country course. And Eola Hill is where our prairie was reborn 24 years ago. It was a different world then: hardly anyone had cell phones, cameras used film, and the twin towers still stood. Millennials were just starting to graduate high school.
The hill was, of course, already a quarter-century old by then and had been colonized by a host of ecologically useless plants. The Enviro teacher before me, Tim Gerk, knew this: before he taught, he’d worked for the Dupage County Forest Preserve District. He was used to restoring ecosystems. He knew what to do and how long it would take.
In the time-honored tradition of environmental science teachers everywhere, he didn’t ask permission, and didn’t really tell anyone, either. He just used his contacts, got the plants, and showed up at Eola Hill on a Saturday. Students earned extra credit if they showed up and helped plug plants. One of the White Wild Indigo seedlings they planted is still there, grandparent to a dozen others of its kind.
I’m sure the walkers, runners, and bikers along the adjacent asphalt trail were clueless about what they witnessed: namely, the birth of our prairie.
I can only imagine Tim out there, clearing and drilling the site as he went, with a dozen or so teenagers on a warm Saturday morning in May. I’m sure the walkers, runners, and bikers along the adjacent asphalt trail were clueless about what they witnessed: namely, the birth of our prairie.
Tim did this, or some variant of it, every May until he left teaching in 2008. That year, he returned to his forest preserve roots. He just recently retired. He still visits the prairie now and then. I think he’s happy with how it has grown.
I got very lucky in 2008, my third year of teaching, when I took over AP Enviro. Before he left, Tim showed me around outside and handed me three weeks of lesson plans. It was mid-August. School started the following week.
To say that my first year of AP Enviro would “challenge” me would criminally undersell the word. But May still rolled around, right on time. I did not have plants, but I did have seeds—a whole bunch of native seeds. So, that year we practiced interseeding around the young prairie.
After that first year, I got better. The course improved, and I had plants. One year, I skipped school and successfully lobbied the county Forest Preserve District’s board for their excess native plants. For a couple of other years, I found grant money to buy plants. Eventually, I found a rhythm with the Fox Valley Park District’s natural areas staff: a few days each winter, they’d truck over their shallow flats of germinated native plants, and my AP kids learned how to transplant them into the deep cell trays the plants needed to properly grow and develop. The Park District picked them up and grew them in their facility and, every May, returned the plants to our students to transplant outside. This was our prairie restoration process for about a decade, and we averaged around 3,000 plants a year. We’ve put incredible diversity into our acreage, too. Everything from towering Compass Plant (and the other Silphiums), to subdominant Side-oats Grama, to brilliant Ohio Spiderwort, and even—for the first time this year—Dalea foliosa.
After a couple years, we ran out of easy space on Eola Hill and began planting an extensive buffer strip around the perimeter of the hollowed-out creek, which is really more like a small lake. Eola Hill is near the small lake’s north end, where the creek opens up, and there’s a short concrete dam and causeway at the south end of the lake.
For most of this decade, we knocked out one section of shoreline a year. And when the Park District conducted a controlled burn, they brought with them enormous cans of prairie seed for the kids to sprinkle over the ashen moonscape.
The Park District assembled a crackerjack burn crew around this time, to better manage all of their natural areas—not just ours. Grasslands are fire-adapted and must be burned to remain healthy. Ours wasn’t burned regularly in its early years, and it was starting to show.
The burn crew was amazing. Whenever they burned our prairie, I got a heads-up and the day’s plans went right out the window. Each period, we’d hustle outside (“bring your inhalers!”) and make our way toward the burn crew. The rule was we had to remain on the asphalt path that ran around the lake and against one side of the hill. Perhaps three feet of turf grass buffer—occasionally more—separated most of the prairie from the path.
Experiencing a prairie burn is one of those things everyone remembers. They are hot, fast, loud, and exciting. And slightly unpredictable. One year, I remember walking with the kids through a tunnel of wildfire smoke. Another year, the other Enviro teacher and I watched a fire tornado 40 feet in front of us grow 20 feet tall. She took a great video of that.
In the early years, burning the entire prairie usually occupied a few hours. As it expanded, the burn eventually took most of a day. Today, if you walk from the lake’s south end by the dam to the northernmost point of Eola Hill it takes about 20 minutes. And you’re walking next to our prairie the whole time.
Even when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we still planted in the spring. It was a tropical afternoon at the end of May 2020. There were no students, but the other Enviro teacher, Sara Young, and I both turned up at the prairie, and together we put over 150 native seedlings in the ground. Our planting streak remained unbroken and growing, much like my COVID-era hair.
But back to the students. They’re still planting every year. Our methods have changed a bit, though: we no longer transplant what the Park District sends our way. We now have a year-long Botany course at WV. The Botany course has been a blessing. Students now do everything for our school’s prairie, from start to finish. In fall, they collect the grass seeds themselves, by hand. Of the half-dozen grass species we collect, Indian Grass seems to be their favorite, with the massive and delicate golden plumes each yielding hundreds of seeds. They also choose which flower species to purchase. They research how to get them to germinate. Then, they actually implement their research. Our fridge and freezer are filled with labeled bags for months, and every few weeks, a new batch of seeds comes out and begins life in the greenhouse.
Last year, we grew around 5,000 prairie plants from seed. We’ll be close to that number again this year. Student-driven, student-led. The kids have their own labeling and tracking system, and every day the first thing they do is walk through the classroom and into the attached greenhouse to check on their plants.
This part of Botany teaches them a marketable skill—growing native plants—and a raft of soft skills too. I never write objectives on the board about the greenhouse: the students take care of their plants on their own. Other courses may ask the students to carry and look after something for a week or so. In our class, these plants start growing as early as October, and don’t leave the greenhouse until mid-May.
The partnership we’ve developed with the Park District is what makes all of this possible. They supply about half of the materials we use in the greenhouse and give us permission to collect seed (it goes back on their property in the end). Without them, we could never sustain the scale and duration of our work. Conservatively, we’ve planted over 50,000 native seedlings since 2001. We’ve put down hundreds of pounds of seed after watching the prescribed burns. Siblings and cousins claim different sections of the prairie as their own. Eventually, we’ll get a student whose mom or dad planted one of the first sections with Tim Gerk.
This prairie has, unsurprisingly, been a boon for the local wildlife. Twenty years ago, there were no foxes, eagles, ospreys, beavers, soft-shelled turtles, or thousands upon thousands of bumblebees…or skunks. We’ve watched each of these species return to the clean waterway—with its rich buffer strip—or to Eola Hill. In one unfortunate student’s case, we smelled it.
A return of biodiversity hasn’t been the only benefit, though. The community as a whole experiences this ecosystem and sees it bloom, from the earliest Prairie Smoke in April to the last Fringed Gentian in November. The asphalt trail that encircles most of it is used by thousands of people daily during the peak summer months. Even in January, there are still dozens of people using it on any given day. It is one of the busiest trail systems in Aurora, Illinois.
I choose to supply hope.
Our students benefit too. These dozen acres are our land lab. Imagine a fieldwork study you can do by simply walking outside during class. There’s no bus, no fuss, and the kids are back by the end of the period. If you need more time, go outside again tomorrow—or all week.
Photographs of the prairie line one of our science hallways. The beauty within the frames reminds teenagers that science isn’t always labs and test tubes and math, but science can also be stunning and breathless. The photographs are a reminder that actions can have an impact for years and decades to come.
The prairie likewise gives hope in our swiftly changing world. It is concrete, living proof that things can improve, that solutions are not always hard—or the responsibility of someone else—and that students can affect their world in just a few hours’ time. It is evidence that they can surprise themselves and others with their accomplishments.
I am a teacher in the very middle of my career. Someone else inhabited my role before me, and someone else will one day replace me. I don’t know what the next person in my role might do, and I’ve learned the future is not something to dwell on anyhow. I can only focus on the time that’s been granted to me. And every year, I choose to do this work with that time. I choose to supply hope.
Providing hope for students is one consistent theme that cuts across all research in environmental education. It is the pervasive imperative, more important with each passing year. Hope is sorely needed among young people. But hope is equally important for the teacher in a classroom. You cannot teach environmental science in the 21st century for very many years without hope. Your own mental health compels it. And it cannot be a Pollyanna-ish hope. It must be something concrete and present, something that inspires, and something that endures.
Let someone else worry about the finishing. You just begin.
Nothing we’ve done at WV is uniquely remarkable. Forest preserve districts and soil water conservation districts come readily to mind. We plant prairie species at WV, because that’s what makes sense for our local geography. Other schools may have different local plant assemblages that make sense for them. Our program has adapted to conditions over the years, been shepherded by two generations of teachers, and is never exactly the same from one year to the next. What does remain consistent is our finish line: each year, we spend a couple of days in May outside, plugging a few thousand plants into the damp spring ground.
Anyone can do this. It costs next to nothing. I still get through my AP curriculum. The Fox Valley Park District is a great partner, but many park districts or other organizations around the country would make great partners. It just requires someone like Tim to begin. Not even to finish. Let someone else worry about the finishing. You just begin. And teach your students how to pet the bumblebees.
Citation
Armstrong, C. (2025). I will teach you how to pet the bumblebees. Kaleidoscope: Educator Voices and Perspectives, 12(1), https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/i-will-teach-you-how-to-pet-the-bumblebees.