Jelly Bean Science

   We had some jelly beans in the house - great for an occasional treat, but I didn't really want the whole bag hanging around. Surprisingly, Kay didn't put up much of a disagreement when I suggested we try a little science with them. 

  First, I had seen somewhere that you could do chromatography with black jelly beans. Since we enjoyed marker chromatography before, I wanted to try it. Place a black jelly bean in water for a second or two, and then place it in the middle of a coffee filter. Then wait. It wasn't breath-taking, but when we checked on it a little later, we could see blue around the outline. 

  So we tried it with some other colors and even an M&M or two, but nothing - just the color seeping into the coffee filter.

 Which brought to mind another idea. Could we write with jelly beans? 

  I put a small bowl of water on the table and we'd dip in the jelly bean, and then try it on a piece of paper. We even rolled them around a bit, as if they were golf balls or marbles.  

  The darker colors came out best, and the lighter ones not at all.

  But this lead to another thing that was all Kay. She liked soaking the jelly beans in the water and then squeezing them until they were little pieces. It was messy, sticky work - and that's why she loved it. I let her get on with it, as long as she kept her sticky mess on the tray. 

  Finally, I asked her what did she think would happen if we put jelly beans into water? "They'll sink." she said. Okay, too many float-or-sink experiments in our past, I suppose. I took a popsicle-maker and some small cups and suggested we separate the jelly beans by color, let them sit in the water and see what happens. 

  The color sorting started off well, as in, the colors were actually being sorted. But then she started mixing them, with the explanation of, "No, this one's lonely and wants to be with her friends." How can you deny a lonely jelly bean? 

  At least a few of the colors remained sorted. 

 We let them sit and watched what happened. She noticed white started to appear on some of the jelly beans. Then that white floated to the top, covering the surface of the water. 

She also noticed that the jelly beans all turned white! And the water they were in turned the color of the jelly beans. 

  All in all, we had some messy, science-y fun with what would otherwise have been a sugar-high-inducing snack. Win!

     Welcome back to the Saturday Science Blog Hop! Check out what my co-hosts have to share and don't miss the linky too! 


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