Unbeelievables: Honeybee Poems and Paintings

Gr 3-5--Another winning compendium in the vein of Florian's Dinothesaurus (S & S, 2009), Insectlopedia (1998), and On the Wing (1996, both Harcourt). Cheerful anthropomorphized caricatures of honeybees accompany upbeat, rhyming wordplay and factual notes in the artist's familiar style. The multimedia pictures, created on brown paper bags, sometimes feature a single bee, sometimes a swarm. Tiny details in the drawings or backgrounds and embedded words in varied fonts add silly notes and visual surprises. Bee anatomy; the roles of the queen bee, drones, and worker bees; and aspects of communication, honey production, and life in the hive all get playful commentary. There's a poem on apiarists, too, and the closing piece, "Where Are the Bees?," reminds readers of the serious matter of the collapse of bee colonies in recent years. "All day we bees/Just buzz and buzz./That's what we duzz/And duzz and duzz." The book is just what Florian duzz and will be welcomed by his fans.--Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

In this high-spirited and lyrical homage to bees, smudgy paintings that resemble a child's chalkboard drawings pair with collage elements to tenderly anthropomorphize the insects. "I'm a lover of clover./ A seeker of scent./ A zigzag flyover--/ A thing heaven-sent," announces one bee, hovering over a daisy. The queen bee appears in a jeweled crown and pink robe, holding a mobile phone: "My doting daughters feed my belly, / And I was raised on royal jelly." Florian also includes descriptions of bee behavior ("One of bees' most important roles in nature is a process called pollination"), which add a touch of biology to his tableaus. Ages 5-up. (Mar.)