Free Choice Poetry - UnBEElievables: Honey Bee Poems and Paintings

1. Bibliographic Citation

Florian, Douglas. 2012. UnBEElievables: Honey Bee Poems and Paintings. New York: Beach Lane Books. ISBN  9781442426528

2. Summary and Review

UnBEElievables takes a poetic look at the fascinating lives of honey bees. Through a series of poems about honey bees, Douglas Florian has created a fun and educational book about bees. The fourteen poems in this collection range from poems about the different types of bees in the hive including drones, workers, and the queen to bee anatomy and the disappearance of honey bees, known as Colony Collapse Disorder. The poems are all rhyming and short, no longer than one page, and each have a full page illustration on the facing page. Florian’s signature style of paint and collage on paper bags continues delight readers with hilarious illustrations of the queen bee with crown, scepter, and cell phone and the drone brothers dressed in hip hop garb. The collection also includes educational poem/illustration pairings such as “Bee Anatomy” showing the honey bee body parts and “Bee-Coming” showing the honey bee life cycle metamorphosis. Each page contains an interesting paragraph explaining the scientific facts behind each poem. There is a “BEEbliography” included at the end as well as URLs for further reading. I had the pleasure of hearing Florian read some of these poems aloud at the TLA conference, and he did a fun call and response with “Drone” and “Worker Bees.” What a treat to hear him read his poetry! One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Bees Buzz,” makes fun use of onomatopoeia, repetition, and rhyme:

Bees Buzz

All day we bees

Just buzz and buzz.

That’s what we duzz

And duzz and duzz.

Why are we full

Of fuzz and fuzz?

Bee-cuzz bee-cuzz

The fuzz the fuzz

Helps pollen stick

To uzz to uzz.

3. Awards/Reviews

*Positive Reviews in School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly

4. Activities

Being so grounded in scientific fact, this book can be used in conjunction with science. I, myself, learned so much about honey bees while reading it. I would divide the class into three groups - workers, drones, and queens. After reading their respective poems in the book and doing some further research, they would create adaptations of “bio poems” about each type of bee. The poems could then be read to the class and/or posted in the hall. To make it even more fun, the library could hold an “UnBEElievable” fun day in which students could dress up as bees and read Florian’s poems to one another or to other classes. They could also do some research on Colony Collapse Disorder and provide facts on what can be done to help. Educational and fun!

5. Related books

*Insectlopedia by Douglas Florian ISBN 9780152163358

*The Beautiful Bee Book by Sue Unstead ISBN 9780769644288

*The Beeman by Laurie Krebs ISBN 9781846862601