unBEElievables by Douglas Florian

Bibliography

Florian, Douglas. 2012. unBEElievables; honeybee poems and paintings. New York: Beach Lane Books. ISBN 978-1-4424-2652-8

Plot summary

This book is unBEElievable with its poems and informative fun facts about honeybees.  In these fourteen poems, you'll learn about hives, queen bees, drones, worker bees, the bee body, life cycle, and so much more.  With beautiful illustrations, you'll have fun and laugh while learning about these important insects.  Make a beeline for this book!

 Critical analysis

With the world undergoing a decline in bees, this fun and witty book is a perfect way to get students interested in bees and their natural habitat and behaviors.  On each page there is a poem and a box of non-fiction information which extends student learning.  Not only can students learn about bees, but this book can also be used to teach the use of literary terms of which examples are sprinkled throughout. It uses echo and onomatopoeia in "Bees Buzz" with "...Of fuzz and fuzz? / Bee-cuzz bee-cuzz / The fuzz the fuzz / Helps pollen stick / To uzz to uzz," and rhymes in "Welcome" "...our hive! / ...where we thrive! / ...sweetness dive! / ...when you arrive!"  There is a "Beebliography" and further reading suggestions which add to student knowledge about this important insect.

Florian's illustrations are occasionally anthropomorphic with the queen bee wearing a crown and bee robe and drones looking like teenage boys. Painted on primed paper bags, the illustrations use gouache paint, colored pencils and collage and have an earthy, soft quality to them.  Florian's uses different type fonts to match each poem - faintly medieval for "Queen Bee" or set in an old-fashioned scientific type when discussing bee eggs hatching in "Bee-coming."  Students will enjoy reading this alone or having it as a read-aloud with its bouncy, rhythmic poems.  

Review Excerpt(s)

"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

“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

  "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

 “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

 “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

 “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

Connections

• For a fun art project, have students use primed paper bags and traditional white art paper to paint and draw the types of bees they learned about in the book. Have them use various types of art materials, for example, paint, charcoal, pencils, and ink. Discuss with students how their pictures look different on the paper bag compared to what it looks like on a piece of white paper.
• Have students choose a type of bee they would like to learn more about (queen bee, drones, worker bees, etc.). Have a variety of non-fiction bee books available in the classroom, or if available, they can use an online database such as World Book Encyclopedia to gather facts. After compiling basic information about the bee (life spans, duties, appearance, etc.) have each student give a 1-2 minute presentation.
     
     * Heiligman, Deborah. Jump into Science: Honeybees. ISBN 978-1426301575
     * Gibbons, Gail. The honey makes. ISBN 978-0688175343
     * Micucci, Charles. The life and times of a honeybee. ISBN 978-0395861394 
  
  
• Scientists have called the decline in bee populations the Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse or Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).  For older students, have them conduct independent research on this phenomena and have a discussion on why it's happening, what would happen to agriculture if bees disappeared and how our way of life would change.  Is there anything students can do to help bring back the bee population?
  
     * Burns, Loree Griffen. The hive detectives: chronicle of a honey bee catastrophe.  ISBN 978-0544003262
     * Slade, Suzanne. What if there were no bees?: a book abuot the grassland ecosystem.  ISBN 978-1404863941