128 pages.
First published Mar. 28, 2023 (Chronicle Books)
Non-fiction (with wonderful illustrations).
Please note: There will be lots of capitalisation, parentheses, and exclamation marks.
What a delightful and utterly irreverent book this is! It probably isn’t suitable for your tot (it’s in the title), but you’ll have fun with it, so get it anyway (and keep it on a high shelf, if that kind of thing is important to you).
I learnt so MUCH about bees. Like, there are 20,000 species, and only about 100 of those are honeybees. Like, not all bees live in trees and your gutters and things; some are burrowers. Into the ground. Not all bees are striped yellow and black; others are chocolate-coloured, or even metallic blue or red (whaaaaat?). Like, the only honeybees that really matter are workers, and they’re the ones with stingers, and they’re actually infertile females. That some bees carry pollen on their abdomens, but most do so on their hairy legs (rather like mine?), giving rise to that bee called the yellow pantalooned one (or something). LOL. That swarming bees really just want to find a new home and are trying to mind their own business, if you’ll only let them. That there’s a huge bee called a Megachile; HA! That bees have four wings that TRANSFORM by linking up to make flying more efficient, and that those wings beat at a rate of 200 times per second (WHAT) to make that buzzing sound. And–this is amazing–bees do this waggle dance on the wall of their hive at the angle of the sun to the horizon and for a certain length of time to tell other bees about distance and direction; how brilliant??!
And, AND, I remember all of this from reading the book last night; I didn’t have to refer back!
Listen, bees are metal. Protect bees!! Get rid of your lawn, and leave dandelions alone. Love bees. And get this book. I’m still so not a fan of honey, but Matt Kracht has made me a fan of bees.
Thank you to Edelweiss and Chronicle Books for this DRC.
You can support independent bookshops, and my writing, by buying it on Bookshop here.
Harare Review of Books 
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