"Florian (Poetrees, 2010, etc.) bestows yet another pleasing mix of punny poems and colorful collages that blend whimsy and fact.... Spreads like "Swarm" epitomize Florian's skill at combining pithy rhymes, well-chosen facts and playfully tongue-in-cheek pictures.... Design is crisp.... Florian shines again here."
—Kirkus Reviews, March 6, 2012
“Another winning compendium…. Cheerful anthropomorphized caricatures of honeybees accompany upbeat, rhyming wordplay and factual notes in the artist’s familiar style…. “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.”
—School Library Journal, February 2012
"Working in gouache, colored pencils, and collage on paper bags, Florian evokes the world of bees with repetitive patterning that cleverly references their honeycombs and the fields of flowers they frequent as well as the bees themselves—worker bees are sisters hatched from eggs laid two thousand at a crack. His rhythmic verse, too, echoes bee behavior, as much with sound as with sense (“I’m a nectar collector. / Make wax to the max. / A beehive protector. / I never relax”). Puns and other wordplay enliven the text (“Why are we full / Of fuzz and fuzz? / Bee-cuzz bee-cuzz / The fuzz the fuzz / Helps pollen stick / To uzz to uzz”). A paragraph of more straightforward facts elucidates each spread, but the real energy here is in the deceptively casual art. A regal queen bee looks almost human, and drones resemble feckless kids, while captions of discretely scattered capitals provide as much texture as information…an offbeat and attractive book, completed with a “BEEbliography.”
—The Horn Book, March/April 2012
“Poetic chronicler of the natural world Florian takes on a more tightly focused subject than usual, winging his way through the world of the honeybee in fourteen rhyming poems…a bee brags of being her “own pollen nation” in “Summer Hummer,” while the onomatopoeic “Bees Buzz” will have kids bzzing their way through the day. A bibliography—sorry, “BEEbliography”—and a couple of web links for further reading are included.”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, March 2012
“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…. 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.”
—Publishers Weekly, February 27, 2012
“The latest in Florian’s series of poetry books spotlighting animals, this attractive volume features bees…. Here the facts appear alongside the verse, an arrangement that works well because knowledge enlarges the experience of reading the verse and helps the information stick…some of the rhyming poems…express the bees’ point of view in a playful way that makes them fun to read aloud or even to memorize…. A nice mix of wordplay and science.”
—Booklist, April 1, 2012
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
Florian (Poetrees, 2010, etc.) bestows yet another pleasing mix of punny poems and colorful collages that blend whimsy and fact. The 14 poems introduce the roles of the queen, drones and workers and touch on such matters as anatomy, development from egg to bee, and even Colony Collapse Disorder. Spreads like "Swarm" epitomize Florian's skill at combining pithy rhymes, well-chosen facts and playfully tongue-in-cheek pictures. "When it's too crowded, then we form / A cloud of bees that's called a swarm." A three-sentence paragraph, offset in smaller type, explains why bees swarm, the role of scout bees and what happens after a new home site is found. The facing picture shows a veritable thunderhead of bees, dwarfing the sun and forest in its imperative to move house. Design is crisp: The text type, Neutra, sits in pleasing, contrasting colors against saturated pages of crimson, ochre-gold and grass green. Characteristically poking visual fun at facts, the mixed-media pictures present bees as cheeky girls and boys with red, kewpie-doll smiles. The queen sports a crown, scepter and cell phone, illustrating the couplet "My princely sons are known as drones-- / Not one of those boys ever phones!" Meanwhile, those Belushi-looking bad boys slouch and smirk in chunky medallions and sideways baseball caps. Florian shines again here. ("BEEbliography," websites for further inquiry) (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)
