Pollinator Week is taking place this month, so I’m taking a moment to bee happy about bees and celebrate these amazing buzzers! Bees are busy right now and for a very good reason – pollination. Without these important pollinators, our food supply would be impacted, and flowering plants would not be able to reproduce. Of course, bees are not the only pollinators, but stories of honey bee decline continue to make the news. Mother Nature depends on these hard workers, and we certainly want to keep Mother Nature happy. This is one of those areas where minding your own beeswax isn’t good; you need to mind the bees’ wax.
Today’s reading list is truly buzz-worthy. I could try to wax eloquent about the life of a bee, but I know my limits. Instead, here are six titles that will inform and delight readers looking for insight into the hive mentality of workers and queens. Did you know that honey bees dance? As far as I’m concerned, that’s the bee’s knees of bee facts.
- Bee People and the Bugs They Love by Frank Mortimer
- Beekeeper’s Lab: 52 Family-Friendly Activities and Experiments Exploring the Life of the Hive by Kim Lehman
- Common Bees of Western North America by Olivia Messinger Carril and Joseph S. Wilson
- A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees by Helen Jukes
- The Little Book of Bees: An Illustrated Guide to the Extraordinary Lives of Bees written by Hilary Kearney, illustrated by Amy Holliday
- The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley
New at the Library
Fiction
- The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren
- The Stellar Debut of Galactica Macfee by Alexander McCall Smith
- The Swan’s Nest by Laura McNeal
Nonfiction
- Big Dip Energy: 88 Parties in a Bowl for Snacking, Dinner, Dessert, and Beyond! by Alyse Whitney
- Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur
- Gut: An Owner’s Guide by Austin Chiang
Children
- My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story written by George Takei, illustrated by Michelle Lee
- Out of the Valley of Horses by Wendy Orr
- Roy is not a Dog written and illustrated by Esme Shapiro and Daniel Newell Kaufman
This is just a small sampling of the many new titles added each week to the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District collection. Visit the district’s 15 locations, our website at www.fvrl.org , or call (360) 906-5000 to reserve titles or find additional listings.
You can email Jan at readingforfun@fvrl.org.
