We got an early start to the day and headed south to Little Sahara to try sandboarding. This is what you do in Australia when sledding in the snow is not an option! A lot more comfortable temperature, but a lot more sand in places it shouldn’t be! We We expected crabby kids from having to carry the boards and get themselves up the hill each time as well as tears from getting sand in their eyes, etc. but they were loving every second of it and we soaked up our 2 hours of sandboarding fun! We hired a toboggan so more of us could sled and a sand board to try our luck at that.
Brian and I tried our sandboarding. We weren’t the best but we had fun! Even the big girls did pretty well with this…Kyla might be a natural!
It was definitely a workout carrying those boards (& sometimes children) up the dunes!
Hallie taking a little break mid-way up the sand dune and Alaina excited to be at the top!
From here, we drove a little further south to check out the beauty of Vivonne Bay.
We saw these guys coming in from their time out catching crayfish and pulling their boat up onto the dock.
On our drive out, we saw an echidna scurrying off the road to hide. We pulled over the get the best picture we could.
We thought we would go on to Seal Bay, but after seeing the prices, decided to make our way back north, but not before checking out this little guy close to the boardwalk quenching his thirst.
We headed back to Kingscote to visit the Island Beehive. We learned a lot about bees and their hives.
They are an organized society with 3 different kinds of bees all doing their part to make the colony work. The queen bee lays all of the eggs, the male drone bees mate with the queen bee, and then there are the female worker bees that feed the queen and the drones, raise young bees and do other work in the hive. Some bee colonies survive beyond 20 years even though individual bees do not live long. Without the queen bee, the colony would cease to exist. The worker bees sense if the queen is planning to leave the hive and respond by building a number of queen cells and the queen lays eggs in each one. If the queen is lost unexpectedly and there is no chance for her to lay eggs, the workers change a worker cell that already has an egg less than 3 days old in a larger queen cell and feed it only royal jelly and a queen develops. When a new queen breaks her way out, she quickly searches for other queen cells to kill the rival queens. If 2 come out at the same time, they fight to the death. The queen only flies twice-her mating flight and when she leaves the nest.
Taste testing the different honeys
Enjoying some honeycomb ice cream and fresh honeycomb
Then we headed over to the pier to see the pelican feeding.
It was a little freaky having them so close to us while we waited for the show to start.
As he started talking and had his fish ready, he sure got the attention of the pelican as well as the seagulls!
The pelicans would go after the seagulls that stole their fish
Then he started feeding the pelicans!
Then it was time to see them take flights and do their hang gliding
Then we grabbed dinner and headed back to our place for the night.
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