Follow That Bee! A First Book of Bees in the City

Follow that Bee! is a winner! This nonfiction book about bees and beekeeping in urban environments has a narrative thread throughout which follows five young friends on their visit to their neighbour, Mr. Cardinal, to see his backyard beehives and to learn about honeybees.

This book is ideal for younger readers for many visual reasons: its consistency, its vibrancy, and its balance of text and white space. Ritchie uses a consistent layout with each topic spanning a double-page spread. Small amounts of large font text fill the left third while colourful, digitally-rendered illustrations fill the remaining two-thirds on the right. His section titles are playful (e.g. “Bee a Friend”) and are displayed in easy-to-read, large font. Below, a short one-or-two paragraph narrative thread not only moves the story forward but also incorporates common and useful facts about bees and beekeeping. Ritchie shares an extra, but topically-related, fact on each page and sets it apart from the narrative by using bold font text. This visual font distinction is clever as it indicates very clearly to the reader which part of the book is the narrative and which is the nonfiction fact. Each adds value to the book in equal measure. Moreover, this approach offers readers a great deal of flexibility in choosing for themselves how to read the book. Younger readers, for example those in preschool, might enjoy only reading the narrative sections of the book whereas older readers could use the nonfiction facts for research or projects. In terms of using this book as a read-aloud, my son and I discovered that the overall flow was better when we focused on the narrative text only.

Ritchie incorporates many elements of a nonfiction text: there is a table of contents at the beginning and a glossary (colloquially termed ‘Words to Know’) at the end; furthermore, his illustrations utilize a variety of labels, diagrams, and maps, and all at the appropriate level of difficulty for his target audience. Overall, Ritchie’s illustrations are detailed, colourful, and full of visual information not discussed overtly in the text. Readers can use the visual stimuli to create small imaginative side-stories for the young friends in the narrative. My son spent considerable amounts of time pouring over the finer details of each illustration which led to many great questions and conversations between us about bees.

Follow that Bee is an exciting addition to Ritchie’s “Exploring Our Community” series. The final pages include a call-to-action for young people to take matters into their own hands in order to protect bees: this action can be on the small scale (i.e. to create a bee bath in your own backyard) or on a larger scale (i.e. to create a pollinator garden at your school or in your community). My preschool-aged son highly enjoyed reading this book with me, and he learned that one of his favourite foods, honey, is made by bees (a major revelation for his young mind!). His excitement for the book was infectious. I would highly recommend this book for the classroom, school library, or home bookshelf.