What is in this collection
The 81 pages fall into three groups, and they appear in this order on the page.
Bee colouring pages
- Simple bees for younger children. Start with the extra simple smiley bee or the bee with one big flower. These have our thickest lines and the fewest shapes on the page — often fewer than ten in total — which matters more than most people realise. A three-year-old holding a fat crayon needs a space at least the width of two fingers to feel successful, and a page crowded with fine detail is where colouring stops being fun.
- Bumblebees. Rounder, fuzzier, drawn with wide stripe bands that leave plenty of open space. There is a bumblebee on lavender, one sheltering under an umbrella in the rain, one bouncing on a flower, and a family picnic with three bees of three different sizes.
- Beehives and honeycombs. The largest group, and the one children ask for most once they get interested in bees. There is the classic dome hive on a branch, a cutaway showing what happens inside, real wooden apiary boxes, a full page honeycomb pattern, and a beekeeper lifting a frame out of a hive.
- Honey bees. Slightly more realistic in shape, and useful for a school topic. The waggle dance page shows the figure-eight pattern bees genuinely use to tell each other where flowers are.
- Cute and kawaii bees. Big eyes, blushing cheeks, cupcakes and balloons — usually the most popular with children aged four to six.
- Queen bees. Crowns, thrones, capes and a royal parade under a flower archway.
Bee printables
Colouring is where most children start, but it is not where they stay. Once a child can hold a pencil steadily, they usually want something with a right answer at the end.
- Dot to dot. The 1 to 10 bee is the starting point, usually around age three or four, once a child can count aloud reliably and recognise written digits. From there the beehive at 1 to 15 and the bumblebee at 1 to 20 add more dots and finer shapes. The A to Z bee swaps numbers for letters, which suits a child confident with counting but still learning alphabet order. The count-by-twos honey pot is the hardest. On every one of them the eyes, stripes and antennae are already printed, so children can tell what they are making before they finish joining.
- Tracing. The flight path sheet is pre-writing practice — straight, wavy, zigzag and looping lines, the four movements that underpin most letter shapes. After that comes picture tracing, then the word BEE on proper three-line handwriting guides with a solid top line, dashed midline and solid baseline, the same format used in most schools. There is also number tracing from 1 to 5, hexagon shape tracing, and a scissor cutting sheet.
- Mazes. Four of them, and the real difference between them is path width. The easy maze has corridors wide enough to follow with a whole crayon rather than a pencil tip, which matters more than the number of turns. The medium maze narrows them and adds dead ends. The honeycomb maze is built from hexagons rather than squares, which changes how it feels to solve entirely. The beekeeper garden maze is the hardest. Each one has exactly one route from start to finish, and we have solved every maze by hand before publishing it.
- Letter B. Six sheets covering letter recognition, stroke formation with numbered arrows, beginning sound sorting, a wall poster, word building with cut-out tiles, and a full A to Z honeycomb strip.
Bee worksheets
- Colour by number. Five sheets in a sensible order of difficulty. The easy bee uses only four colours with very large regions, which is right for ages three to five — beyond six colours, young children lose track. The honeycomb grid hides a shape that appears once the hexagons are filled in correctly. The last one swaps numbers for sums, so children work out the answer before looking it up in the key. The number sits small and central in each region deliberately, so the colour covers it as your child works.
- Puzzles. Spot the difference with five changes hidden between two garden scenes, an odd one out sheet, a word search with ten hidden bee words, and a picture crossword that uses drawings instead of written clues so pre-readers can join in.
- Matching and sorting. Shadow matching, draw-a-line matching, pattern completion, and a size ordering sheet where five bees are cut out and arranged smallest to biggest.
- Drawing. Two symmetry sheets where half the picture is drawn and your child completes the other half on a grid, plus a grid copy sheet. That last one is genuinely useful for children who say they cannot draw — breaking a picture into squares turns drawing into copying, and copying is something everybody can do.
- Maths, counting, crafts and games. Adding bees, honeycomb number bonds, an I spy tally scene, a count and graph sheet, a face mask, finger puppets, bookmarks, twelve memory match cards and a twenty space board game.
The bee life cycle sheet
Worth calling out separately. Egg, larva, pupa, adult — cut out the four cards and paste them into the numbered boxes in order. It pairs naturally with the cutaway honeycomb page earlier in this collection, which shows a larva curled in its cell, and with the beekeeper page.
If you are a teacher covering minibeasts or pollinators, printing those three together gives you a short sequence that works with almost no preparation. Adding a page from our butterfly coloring pages makes the comparison between two very different life cycles easy to show side by side.
Print or colour online
Every page here works two ways. Download the PDF and print at home, or click the online colouring link and fill it in directly in your browser — no app, no download, no account.
Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child prefers felt tips or paint, slightly heavier paper stops the colour bleeding through. For anything you want to keep — the mask, the bookmarks, the memory cards, the letter tiles — card stock is worth it, and a laminator will make the memory cards last a whole term rather than an afternoon.
All sheets are sized for US Letter and crop cleanly to A4, so the same file works either side of the Atlantic.
A few colouring ideas
Bees are yellow and black, but nothing says they have to be. Some of our favourite finished pages have come back purple and turquoise. If your child does want realistic colours, try mixing yellow with a little orange on the body rather than using yellow alone — it gives a much warmer result than a flat wash.
For the garden scenes, one simple trick makes a page look far more finished: colour the flowers in shades that contrast with the bee rather than sitting beside it. A purple or blue bloom makes a yellow bee jump off the paper, and green leaves against a yellow body do the same thing. Our flower coloring pages are a good place to practise this on its own before bringing it back to a busier bee scene.
On the honeycomb pattern page, try leaving some hexagons completely white. The empty cells give the eye somewhere to rest, and the finished page looks deliberate rather than unfinished.
Bee facts your child might enjoy
A honey bee visits somewhere around two million flowers to make a single jar of honey. A hive can hold up to sixty thousand bees, but only one queen. Bees see ultraviolet light that humans cannot, which means flowers look completely different to them — many carry patterns invisible to us that guide bees straight to the nectar. And the waggle dance on one of our pages is real: a returning bee dances a figure eight, and the angle of that dance tells the others which direction to fly.
More pages like these
If this collection went down well, these use the same thick-line style and the same age range:
Our full activities section has the same style of worksheets across other themes, and everything on KidsColorOnline is free to print or colour online, with no signup, forever.
