A detail from the cover of "The Honeybee Man"
The Honeybee Man
By Lela Nargi, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker, Schwartz & Wade Books, 32 pages, $19.99, ages 4 to 7
After his early-morning cup of tea, Fred, a.k.a. The Honeybee Man, opens a trap door on the third floor of his Brooklyn house and climbs out onto the roof. From this vantage point, he surveys the quiet city around him: "Brownstones and linden trees, a tall clock tower, and bridges in the distance." On the roof, though, there is, "another, tiny city. It has three houses, each with two white stories and one red story, and inside thousands of tiny rooms made of wax."
All appears to be quiet in the houses of this small city, but Fred knows otherwise. Inside those buildings, those hives, Queen bees Mab, Nefertiti and Boadicea rule their city states of thousands of worker bees. "Good morning, my bees, my darlings!" Fred cries.
As the morning progresses and the city around him awakens, Fred watches his bees leave the hive in search of all that city gardens have to offer - nectar from sweet peas and squash blossoms, sage flowers and linden flowers. So charming a companion is our Honeybee Man, so intriguing are his mental and physical peregrinations, that the reader may not really cotton on to the fact that he or she is on a learning mission: By the end of this, he or she will have learned almost all that needs to be known about beekeeping, honey-making and honey harvesting.
Alberta resident Kyrsten Brooker's collage-and-oil illustrations, expansive and at times surreal, play no small part in the visual and gustatory delights between the covers of the book. Even the endpapers, with their diagrams of bees, cross-sections of flowers and beehives offer their own opportunities for the stealth learning.