Bees and Other Pollinators
Bees and Other Pollinators
When a bee finds a good source of food, it does a “waggle dance” to tell other bees where to go. The direction the bee dances tells the others the direction to fly. The length of the dance tells the bees how far away the food source is from the hive.
Without bees, there would be fewer seeds and flowers. Other species like birds and rodents, depend on seeds and flowers for their food. Bigger predators depend on the smaller animals for their food. Without bees, many animals would starve.
In China, some crops are pollinated by people. The people use paintbrushes to rub pollen on every plant. If there were no bees, farmers in North America would have to do the same thing.
Bees and Other Pollinators is a colourful fact-filled book for any young reader who is interested in random facts about all kinds of pollinators. This book includes both animal and insect pollinators such as hummingbirds, bats, ruffed lemurs, kinkajou, sugar gliders, bees, butterflies, moths and beetles. A wide variety of topics are covered, including types of bees, the bee life cycle, different bee roles, other pollinators, and reasons for the decline of pollinators .
Every two page spread has about 10 sentences of information with vivid coloured photographs in the background. This book is physically small, like a guide book, and it will appeal to children and reluctant readers because the text is not overwhelming with small font facts like most nonfiction books. In fact, the information is presented in a spatial layout that makes it visually easy to read without the reader’s feeling bombarded by all the text. For example, coloured bolded vocabulary and the word’s definitions are placed in bubbles scattered amongst the pages, thereby making the information easier to read and process.
Although Bees and Other Pollinators is a fun fact-filled book, it still is useful source of information. It would be more user-friendly, however, if there was a table of contents, index, glossary, and page numbers to locate key words and ideas more efficiently if using it as a quick reference. These features would have allowed this book to be used for research purposes, but, since these features are missing, it limits its users to just leisure reads.
Overall, Bees and Other Pollinators is a very appealing and informative leisurely read for young readers as well as reluctant readers. The bountiful coloured visuals paired with the brightly coloured bold fonts and fun facts will attract the attention of this targeted audience group.
Sheryl Lee is a mother of two young children and a teacher-librarian in New Westminster, British Columbia.