Published: Friday, Oct. 23, 2009 / Updated: Friday, Oct. 23, 2009 07:08 AM

11-year-old creates buzz with best bee dancing essay in U.S.

There can only be one best. Best fisherman, best apple-bobber, best double-dutch rope skipper. The best 4-H essayist in all of America, on the subject of the dance language of honey bees, is Helen Coats, an 11-year-old Rock Hill girl.

Helen's essay entered in a national beekeeping contest called “The Bee Dance — Not Exactly the Electric Slide,” beat essays from children in 27 states. Read the complete essay here.

She won the South Carolina contest first, then the national contest. Margie Sippel, who runs the Clemson Extension Service's 4-H programs, said Helen is the first national winner from South Carolina in the annual essay contest. Then Helen did one better and beat everybody else in the country, too.

“And before I started, I didn't know much about bees, except they make honey,” Helen said.

But she sure found out a lot. Then she went out and won a national contest, judged by experts in bees and experts in writing, and the $750 that goes with it.

Her essay is four pages long. Helen had to source her work, find out the facts through months of research and cobble it all together.

“It took me a month to write, then my dad read it and told me I had to do it over and source my information better,” Helen said.

When Helen found out she had won, her parents, Gerianne and Paul, were stunned.

“Delighted after the initial shock,” Gerianne Coats said. “But Helen is a determined little girl. She really worked hard on this.”

Helen's essay talked about how bees dance to communicate at the honeycomb, using “a kind of circular pattern, occasionally crossing it with a zigzag or a waggle, across the center.” She wrote about the effects of the angle of the sun, how different bees dance, the difference between bees who are wallflowers during the dance and those who shake their bee behinds more than others.

“I just did it to learn something about bees,” a modest Helen said.

But she won.

Helen, a home-schooler, is in a 4-H class about the outdoors with other kids called the Leopold Project. The class is operated in conjunction with Rock Hill Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

“We think it is a pretty special thing to have a young person from York County who is the best in the country,” said Sippel, the Clemson agent.

Helen has made the bee-winners version of the victory tour. She's gotten accolades from the York County and South Carolina beekeepers associations, and she is mentioned by name in the 4-H contest for next year's contest. Pretty heady stuff for an 11-year-old girl.

And here's the kicker: Helen does not keep bees. She does not make honey. She was “a lot younger — I was only 10” when she wrote the essay. And before Helen took on this project, her mother was what she called “bee-phobic.”

“I was scared of bees,” Gerianne Coats said.

“She would go crazy if there was one even near her,” Helen said.

But now, the family loves bees.

They have to, when the only girl in America to compare the bee dance to the wedding-staple Electric Slide is the best 4-H bee writer in the whole country.