It’s not every day that your little honey bee turns one, so I wanted to be sure that my baby girl’s first birthday party was just as sweet as she is! I decided to throw a bee themed party in honor of our queen bee.
Today I’m so excited to share her bee birthday party and lots of bee 1st birthday party ideas with you!
It was a bright sunny party day so the light was a bit harsh in a few of the photos, despite the party being later in the afternoon. We made it work though!
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Bee Themed Party Details
Honey Bee Nectar in Honey Bear Cups
Did you know that you can turn a plastic honey bear bottle into a honey bear cup? Just add a straw and you have the most darling honey bear straw cup!
I ordered these perfect empty honey plastic bear bottles that are clear and BPA-free. They come in a pack of 12 for super cheap on Amazon. A yellow striped straw fits inside the hole perfectly!
Just fill with some ice-cold honey bee nectar, aka lemonade.
I’ll be sharing the tutorial and cut file for how to customize each bear bottle with a Cricut machine very soon. I love how each bottle is personalized with the number one and a bee!
Bumble Bee Birthday Party Food Ideas
I didn’t get any photos of the main food that I served at my daughter’s bee themed party, but everything was absolutely DELICIOUS!!
I made the cutest food and drink labels that matched the invitations PERFECTLY that I’ll be sharing as a free download soon. Stay tuned!
Bar-BEE-cue food seemed like a great choice for a bee birthday with lots of family, so here’s what we ate:
- Bar-BEE-cue Brisket: I bought a big beef brisket at Costco and asked my dad to smoke it in his smoker all day. The flavor was incredible!!
- Bar-BEE-cue Pulled Pork: My husband makes the most amazing pulled pork, so he helped out with this dish. SO yummy!
- Bar-BEE-cue Sauce: We have a local BBQ restaurant we love that makes a fabulous sauce, so I ordered some from them to eat with our food.
- Baked BEE-ans: It just wouldn’t be right to not have baked beans with this meal.
- Potato Salad: Nope, not bee themed, but we just had to have it. 😉
Bee Cakes
Even though I was as busy as a bee getting ready for this bee themed party, I knew that I wanted to make two bee cakes. One cake would be for everyone at the party, while the other would be a smash cake for Sienna.
I’ll be sharing tutorials for the bee cakes soon, but I am SO pleased with how they both turned out!
For Sienna’s smash cake, I created a darling beehive cake made with this gold Nordic Ware Beehive Cake Pan. This cake only LOOKS difficult to make. With this pan, all I did was pour the batter in each side, bake it, then add frosting in the middle to put the cake together.
It was seriously easy and so cute!! Her bee cake got so many compliments, and baby girls LOVED it, especially the little candy bees on top that I ordered.
Forget about the cake, she just wanted to pick off all the candy bees and suck on them, ha! She actually picked off two of the cake bees too.
The bee cake I made for everyone else was a bit more complicated, but really cool to make. This cake was a homemade lemon honey cake, like the smash cake, but was baked in regular round cake pans.
To make the cool honeycomb design on the outside of the cake, I used melting chocolate and bubble wrap. Yes, bubble wrap! I’ll share the tutorial for this cake too, but it was definitely fun to try a new technique.
The cake had flowers and a 6″ honey dipper on top. I also added some bubble wrap chocolate honeycomb pieces to the top to add more texture and color. I added more candy bees to the outside of the honeycomb on the cake to finish it off.
And because I like to go overboard sometimes, I also baked these sweet honey lemon mini bundt cakes. They were so cute! A few people told me they looked like the minis from Nothing Bundt Cake.
A drippy lemon vanilla white glaze and more of those adorable candy bees finished off the mini bee cakes.
Bee Birthday Table
For the party table, I bought some yellow and white gingham fabric from Joann that I used as a tablecloth. The party favor boxes I used were the same yellow and white gingham and matched the table cover perfectly!
I incorporated wood elements and flowers and greenery to add a natural outdoor, almost country feel to the table.
Wood crates, wood slices, and wood slice platters were lovely additions.
My very FAVORITE wood pieces on the table are the wood beehive, the two wood twig pots filled with flowers, and the vintage wood soap wagon. The pieces are so sweet, but even more so because of the story behind each one.
The amazing wood beehive was created by my husband’s uncle Paul, who is a wood turner. He is incredibly talented and makes stunning vases, bowls, and all sorts of other things. You can check out his Etsy shop here.
Paul also made the two twig pots, one that’s on the table filled with white flowers and the other on the ground filled with daffodils.
The vintage wood wagon was a decoration in my husband’s late grandmother’s bedroom. Their home was lovingly decorated with lots of antiques, and grandma displayed this wagon in her room with some of her teddy bear collection inside.
I added a couple of my glass apothecary jars inside and filled them with lemon drops and lemons.
Since grandma recently passed, I wanted to use the wagon to have a piece of her there at the bee themed party. Although she died before my daughter was born, I know that she would have adored her and would be proud to be represented at her first birthday!
This vintage honeycomb bee has a story behind it. The quick version is that I was helping clean out grandma and grandpa’s house after their passing, and I was drawn to a large trunk that was FILLED with silk flowers. If you know anything about grandma, you’d know that she had quite the silk flower collection and literally had closets, trunks, and drawers devoted to all her flowers.
In the very bottom of the flower-filled trunk lay a small envelope with a bee on it. Inside was this one cute bee honeycomb decoration. I’m convinced that this wasn’t a coincidence, and that it was waiting there for me to find it and use it for Sienna’s birthday!
A silver dollar eucalyptus garland lay across the front of the table with white and yellow flowers scattered throughout.
My husband wanted to make something for our bee themed party last minute, so he headed to the craft store and picked up a wood slice. He printed a photo of my daughter in her yellow dress, then cut it out and Mod Podged it onto the wood slice. Amazing, right?!
He also picked up the galvanized “S” and placed it next to his masterpiece and the honeycomb bee. Such a sweet contribution! Not going to lie, I was in last-minute panic when he told me what he was doing, but it ended up just being PERFECT.
Bumble Bee Party Favors
Sweet little jars of honey made for the perfect bee party favors for everyone. I bought some small hexagon glass jars and filled each jar with honey.
I used my husband’s late grandma’s vintage yellow sheets to make fabric tops for the honey and used my Cricut machine and white iron on to personalize them. On top of each jar of honey was a white bee with the number “1” inside for my daughter’s first birthday.
Darling mini honey dippers (3″) were the perfect accent I added to the jars with some jute twine.
I share exactly how to make these cute bee party favors here!
A bee themed party is a great way to celebrate your queen (or king) bee. I hope I’ve inspired you and given you some ideas to create your own bee birthday!
I’m so grateful for this little busy bee. We sure do love her and look forward to celebrating many more birthdays!
Stay tuned for FREE bee party printables and bee cake tutorials coming soon!!
