Customer Reviews

The Bumblebee Queen

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How pleasant to find a children's book about an insect without anthropomorphic illustrations. Patricia Wynne's illustrations are bright, sunny, and accurate, allowing young readers to have a close up view of bumblebees as they really look. Done in watercolor and ink, her drawings of the differences between queens, drones, and workers are especially fetching.

Author Sayre's text is spare with informational asides, such as the number of species of bumblebees, their stinging habits, how nectar becomes honey, etc. The author has chosen to relate the life span of one queen bee, tracing the bee from early spring when she is underground to emerging and building her colony, and finally the birth of new queens and drones.

Youngsters may well be surprised at what one small bee can accomplish, and develop a healthy admiration for nature's creatures.

- Gail Cooke

Simple but concise drawings and watercolor illustrations of a queen bee and her stages of life, duties, activities and choices. The illustrator is a well-known scientific artist and the quality of her work speaks for itself in this story. No wonder this book received the TCA, Teacher's Choice Award. Each page is a story with descriptive qualities and then there is a little bee that circles a dialogue bubble with factual information different but adding to the story to enhance clarity and answer questions the child might be asking hiim/herself. I learned so much from reading this book and was amazed at how much I retained because of the manner in which it was written, simple and direct. I might have rated this book a 5, but I felt as if someone ripped the last conclusionary page of the book out. It really needed one or two more sentences. I did enjoy the extra pages in the back of the book filled with bee websites, bee activities, good bee-havior and a list of other bee books.