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| The ROM has a crystal-like structure jutting out of it |
The Royal Ontario Museum has something for everyone: there are informative exhibitions that invite visitors to touch and smell items, and staff on hand to give more interesting facts and answer questions, and a large room for children to freely play and do activities without disturbing others.
Currently the museum has an exhibition called Bees: A Story of Survival. It informs people about the plight of bees, how they form from egg to insect, and how crucial they are to human survival through their act of pollination.
There were so many interesting facts about bees sprinkled throughout the show:
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| A most intricate porcelain vase |
More than 75 percent of the world's food crops depend on pollinators like bees
One hectare of a well-managed meadow can contain about 7.5 million flowers, enough to support over 200,000 bees.
Bees have 170 smell receptors, as scent is essential for bees to survive, reproduce, communicate, find food sources, and keep their nests safe.
Bees produce a resin-like material called propolis, which has anti-microbial properties that we use in medicine, including cough syrups and cosmetics.
There are more than 300 native bee species living in and around Toronto
Most bees are wild and don't live in hives. Other kinds of bees include:
Mason bees that live in existing south-facing holes, like trees to window frames;
Leafcutter bees that cut discs in leaves and glue them together with leaf pulp to build cells;
Mining bees make nests in the ground and dig vertical tunnels into the the soil;
Indian stingless bees create nests in tree trunks, logs and wall cavities.
There were also some interesting exhibits where visitors touch the screen to illuminate some facts, a room where points of light represented a bee and showed what a swarm looked like, mostly to protect their queen.
Most fascinating was a video from a bee's point of view of what the outside world looked to them, how they are near-sighted so they depend on the bright colours of flowers to guide them to find pollen.
Another interesting fact is that a wild honey bee queen can lay 1,500 to 2,000 eggs each day, and produces a scent called pheromone that encourages the colony to work together.
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| Over 100 birds in movement |
We also wandered around other parts of the museum, looking at the rooms showcasing China and Korea, metal armour dating back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, many dinosaur bones, and a replica of a Ming dynasty tomb with a tomb guard.
Another room showed Japanese textiles and the most intricate porcelain vase we'd ever seen. Up close there were tens of thousands of tiny delicate swirls that looked like flower petals. It's called Cocoon by contemporary artist Makkiko Hattori, and is actually part of the collection at the Gardiner Museum across the street from the ROM!
Kids are sure to have a fun time at the ROM with interactive exhibits, and several volunteers and staff explaining things and answering questions. After looking at the bee display, we went to see the live bees the museum keeps and a woman was there to show us the queen bee (marked with a blue dot), and that there was a drone bee in the hive too. The bees can go in and out of the hive through a plastic pipe that leads to the outside of the museum.
We also enjoyed the section on birds, where over 100 avian species are on display, mostly in flight, so visitors can see how they move and in particular, flying above people as they walk through the exhibit.
There was also a room full of precious stones, many of which we did not know there were so many names for! Lots of giant sparkling rocks that were made over 4.5 billion years ago.
Mind boggling!
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park
Toronto
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