Celebrating the Sugarbeet Festival at Storytime

I live in a little town in Montana called Chinook.  It is a tiny, but lovely town that I am proud to call home.  Every September in Chinook, the Sugarbeet Festival is held.  Chinook was a very important sugarbeet producer in the 1930's and 40's and although we do not commercially grow sugarbeets here anymore, we still celebrate that part of our history.  Out mascot is the Sugarbeeter and we have a Sugarbeet Festival.  It's very cool.
So, every year since I started doing storytime, I have entered our storytime group into the sugarbeet decorating contest at the Sugarbeet Festival.  Local farmers grow sugarbeets and then have them out around town so that people can take them home and decorate them.  I usually gather up five or six sugarbeets and bring them to storytime for the kids to decorate.  We won first place last year and I intend to win it again this year!
This year's Sugarbeet Festival theme (there's always a theme that involves some kind of Chinook business or industry) is the honeybee industry.  So, naturally, I had the kids paint the sugarbeets to look like bees.  But first, I read them some bee books.
This week we read The Very Greedy Bee by Steve Smallman and The Honeybee and the Robber by Eric Carle.

Here are some photos of the finished project that we entered into the Sugarbeet Decorating Contest.
I had the kids paint the sugarbeets black and yellow and after they dried, I added eyeballs and wings. I gave the bees pipe cleaner arms so they could hold the little books I'd made for them (bee books, of course).