What Would We Be Without Bees? The Thing About Bees: A Love Letter by Shabazz Larkin

Sometimes bees can be a bit rude.
They fly in your face and prance on your food.

If a bee has to sting you, it definitely hurts.
But life without bees would be even worse.

Without bees there would be no flowers, (or cauliflowers), no watermelons, no strawberry shortcake or apple pie, no mangoes for smoothies, no cucumbers for pickles on your hamburgers.

When a bee and a flower love each other, a fruit is born!

It's called POLLINATION!

Most growing thing depend on bees (and their associates--butterflies and other bugs, hummingbirds and even fruit bats) to spread pollen from flower to flower so that plants make fruits with seeds and their seeds can get planted to grow more plants that make flowers to be pollinated--well, you get the idea!

So what would we be without BEES?

HUNGRY! VERY HUNGRY!

In his The Thing About Bees: A Love Letter (Readers to Eaters, 2019), author-illustrator  Shabazz Larkin offers much knowledge about the bee and the life cycle of plants, and much wisdom in a sweet lesson in parental love. Parents are the first teachers, and this book offers a lot of information about living in peace with nature. A double-page spread offers "Everything You Need to Know About How Not to Get Stung" along with information about various members of the bee family, from "Kind" bumblebees to "Kinda Mean" yellow jackets and what to do to co-exist with those stinging insects. Larkin's theme is that we must all be "bee keepers," and his lively and lovely illustrations of bees doing their thing in various settings and kids encountering them is a cheery little science lesson on a very serious subject. Says School Library Journal, “Starring an affectionate family and a whole lot of bees, Larkin offers up a sparkling celebration of necessary pollinators…."