Thursday, October 1, 2026
There’s a national day to celebrate just about everything, so it’s only fitting that one of nature’s most important — and often misunderstood — creatures has one of its own.
That would be the honeybee. Long Island Children’s Museum invites families to take a closer look at the tiny pollinators that play an outsized role in our ecosystem, on Aug. 15, National Honey Bee Day. The museum has been home to over 20,000 honeybees year-round since 2012, when a hive was introduced to the Feast for Beasts exhibit, which opened in January of that year. Visitors were welcomed to the first “Honey Hoopla” then so that everyone could experience the initial harvesting of honey from that hive.
More than a decade later, the event has become a popular annual tradition.
Today, the museum maintains four active hives, including an enclosed observation hive inside the Feasts for Beasts gallery. Housed between large panes of plexiglass and connected to the outdoors through a protected tube, thousands of honey bees come and go through a portal that allows them to leave the building, forage in the museum’s pollinator garden and return to the hive, where they work together to sustain the colony. Visitors can safely watch honey bees build honeycomb, care for their queen and work together. Special red lighting helps families observe the hive with minimal disruption to the bees’ natural behavior.
The fruit of their labor? Lots of honey, naturally.
Families are welcome to taste many different varieties of honey during a tasting session, including, of course, from the museum’s honey harvest. Color, aroma and taste can change based on the nectar of the flower. Everyone can sample various honeys and try to match the flavor profile to the specific honey type.
“A lot of people maybe don’t know that honey can taste different from different varieties of flowers or the location where it is. We’re going to be offering honey varieties that the kids can taste test and try to match up,” Ashley Niver, the museum’s director of education, says.
Bee-themed activities are designed to highlight the insects’ importance to the environment. Children can create a colorful Busy Bee Hat, while adults and kids alike can meet beekeeper Mark Rogan, one of the museum’s exhibit technicians. He shares insights into bee management, explains how honeybee colonies work and will help visitors spot the queen inside the observation hive.
“He’ll be up in the hive showing how to find the queen and explaining what the care is like,” museum spokesperson Stephanie Siler says. “He’ll also talk about the observation hive and the three other hives on our roof, answering questions about the bees’ daily care and how we harvest the honey.”
Everyone can even try on a life-size beekeeper suit, offering a hands-on glimpse into the world of beekeeping. The observation hive itself — an actual working hive — remains one of the museum’s most unique exhibits. Because the bees are free to travel outdoors and back into the hive throughout the day, through a portal, museum staff can never be certain exactly how many are in residence.
‘”We like to say that they’re the only animal in our collection that we don’t know how many we have because they’re always coming and going, and they’re the only animal that has free roam of the museum,” Siler says, jokingly.
While this is all designed to be fun, the program also carries an important conservation message. Climate change, habitat loss and pesticide use continue to threaten honey bee populations, contributing to colony collapse disorder and declining numbers worldwide.
Visitors will learn that honey bees are responsible for pollinating some of Long Island’s most abundant crops including melons, pumpkins, tree nuts and berries and that the population is in danger and decreasing rapidly. Without these pollinators, we would lose some of our favorite foods such as chocolate, grapes, apples and pears.
To help support bee conservation, the museum continues its Name A Honey Bee Campaign. For a $10 donation, folks can symbolically name one of the museum’s bees, with both the bee’s new name and the donor recognized on a display.
Beyond raising funds, museum leadership’s goal is to replace fear with fascination.
“It’s very easy for people to feel fearful of bees because they don’t want to be stung, and maybe they assume that all bees are looking to sting and cause harm,” Niver adds. “But the reality is that the honey bees are very docile, and they are just looking to make their honey. They’re really our friends.”
Siler understands those fears firsthand.
“For me personally I was terrified of bees, growing up,” she says. “So I hope that every child gets to experience them up close and leaves with a new-found appreciation. Not just because they make honey, but because they’re essential to our gardens, our food.”
Whether sampling fresh honey, searching for the queen bee or discovering how a bustling hive works, everyone will leave with a deeper appreciation for one of nature’s smallest yet most essential creatures. This is an opportunity to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards by showing that protecting pollinators begins with understanding them. In the process, families may find themselves buzzing away with a newfound respect for the tiny insects that help keep our gardens, farms and dinner tables thriving.
