Tuesday Storytime: Honeybees

A pair of really long books, and one super-short book in the middle to make up for it.  The room was packed today, and lots of wiggle-worms, so hard to say how much of it actually was seen/heard.

The Honeybee Man
Lela Nargi, illustrations by Kyrsten Brooker
ISBN: 9780375849800
Oddly-perspectived-picture-frames focus attention on the tiny bees and the urban environment.

Reviewed here.
Fred lives in Brooklyn with his family: Cat the cat, Copper the dog, and Mab, Nefertiti, and Boadica the queen bees with their hives full of children.  Fred's honeybees travel out through Brooklyn and gather pollen and nectar from neighbors small yards, rooftop gardens, windowboxes, and the linden trees lining the avenues, and even (sometimes, if he's lucky) from the blueberry bushes across town.  Once they've worked all summer, Fred pulls out the frames of honey, caps and spins them, and decants the lovely honey into jars that he gives out to his neighbors one late-August afternoon.  Good, but very wordy, and the illustrations are interesting, but not exactly vibrant - lots of muted colors and flesh-tones and browns and greys of buildings.


 
Bear and Bee
Sergio Ruzzier
ISBN: 9781423159575
Roly-poly bear is offered honey by a friendly little winged bug, but he's worried about the dread bee.

Super short, super cute.  Bear wakes up from his winter nap and is hungry.  A cute little yellow winged creature (sizes are NOT to scale here) offers some honey, and bear is tempted, but he's afraid of the BEE!  He's never seen one, but it's huge, and has fangs, and claws, and never shares honey.  A quick run-down of bear's personal attributes (huge, has fangs, has claws) has him momentarily worried that HE's the BEE!  but his new bug friend reassures him, then cautiously explains the truth, and re-offers the honey.  Now bear has a full tummy, a full mind, and a new friend.  Adorable.


Flight of the Honey Bee
Raymond Huber, illustrated by Brian Lovelock
ISBN: 9780763667603
Beautiful vibrant colors and expressionistic close-ups of bees.

Reviewed here.  A bit long for storytime, especially with a big and energetic group, but it was very well received, and the illustrations especially captured the interest of lots of the kids.  Really well done book, and very glad I'm aware of it.  Nonfiction is so hard to do for this age-group, and I'm always glad to have the chance to do more of it.

Picture Book Roundup: Nonfiction! The Day-Glo Brothers, Flight of the Honey Bee

And this post marks the last of the great pile of new books we got on Monday.  One final biography, and a really great naturalist book.

The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer's Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors

Chris Barton, illustrated (IN DAY-GLO!!) by Tony Persiani

ISBN: 9781570916731
(Robert F. Siebert Honor Book)
Dexters Laboratory-style line drawings, with bright fluorescent colors and DAY-GLO!!! 

Did you ever think about who invented those eye-searing day-glo colors?  Me either!  And that's a shame, because it's a great story.  These two brothers had ambitions: Bob wanted to be a doctor, and Joe wanted to be a famous stage magician.  Sadly, life didn't work out for those ambitions - Bob hit his head, and Joe's magic needed some sort of extra spark to catch the eye of talent scouts.  Instead of getting discouraged, the brothers worked together - first discovering and marketing regular ultraviolet-fluorescing colors, then (accidentally) discovering the secret to DAY-GLO EYE SEARING COLORS!!!

And now you know!  Go read the book, seriously - it's awesome!

Flight of the Honey Bee
Raymond Huber, illustrated by Brian Lovelock
ISBN: 9780763667603
pen & ink, watercolors, and pencil, perspective-forced oversize bees, hyperfocus.

This is a lovely book.  Lots of detail in the artwork, but the text is simple and straightforward, following the adventures of a bee scout, sent to find a good source of pollen and nectar for the hive.  Scout braves birds and storms, finds a lovely patch of flowers, escapes from wasps, and figure-8-dances the directions to her sister bees.  The story includes factual details about the story elements on that spread, and the endpapers feature ways to help preserve honeybees, and an index.  I like that the book, despite the picture-book appearance, has many features of nonfiction for older readers; page numbers, index, text notes.  This would be a great picture-book to pair with a bedtime chapter-by-chapter reading of The Adventures of Maya the Bee.