Bee amazed, bee informed, bee delighted by the super-duper, power-packed bumblebee.

Full of fascinating buzz facts, video links, and ideas, this wonderful book is perfect for little readers.

Read more below.

Click on image to enlarge 🙂

I was enchanted by Rachel Weston’s attractive little bumblebee book right from the moment I read its title, Bumblebees Have Smelly Feet. They do, too. On page 8, I read about the ‘oily, smelly footprint’ which bumblebees leave on each flower they have visited, thus warning other bees that the nectar – ‘their liquid candy’ – has already been collected.

‘Bumblebees are the jumbo jet planes of the insect world.’ Rachel Weston has a prose style that really captures the interest of young readers. ‘One bumblebee can do 50 times the work of one honeybee. The bumblebee is a super-duper pollinator.’’

Every aspect of bumble life is introduced in this book: anatomy, eyesight, life-cycle and reproduction. There are also plenty of interesting ideas such as replicating the bumblebee’s ‘buzz pollination’ with the vibrations of an electric toothbrush on a tomato flower. If you find your kids freezing tonic water, blame Rachel Weston and the UV experiment on page 15.

Bumblebees Have Smelly Feet is well-illustrated, with a wide range of handsome colour photographs of bumblebees in action.  Deborah Hinde has provided some elegant and amusing bee illustrations, as well as slipping three funny forgeries into the Bumblebee Family Photos (pages 30-1).

The lively information provided, as well as the resources at the back of the book, make this readable volume an ideal addition to primary school classrooms and libraries. There is a really good index, a set of useful websites and a page of Learning Activities.  The Glossary is also excellent; for example, Dumbledore is an ‘old English name for bumblebee’.

Be warned: the book also contains full instructions on how to obtain and set up a box colony of bumblebees.

You guys are awesome!
Thank you Hukerenui School & Jodie Baldwin, class teacher.

What a perfect summery cover for a book about bees. The book is packed with information on everything you ever wanted to know about bees and more. I shared this with a group of children and this is what they had to say.

They loved the title and thought having a funny title was good. They enjoyed the photos next to the writing and the information about bees.  They all loved the funny drawings at the back of the book where the bees are wearing costumes. They thought the reading level was just right for them. In fact, they were all very taken with this non-fiction book and agreed we all need to encourage bees to visit our gardens. As one of them said “we have to look after our bees for everyone”.

This has all the qualities I look for in a non-fiction book. Quality photos, glossary, index, bold headings and sub-headings which is great for children who like to dip and dive into a non-fiction book. The buzz facts is a cool addition to this well-researched book.

Certainly a book to add to any school library and one for home too.

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Discovering that bumblebees live in underground burrows sent the Bay of Plenty’s Rachel Weston on a hunt for knowledge. What she discovered is revealed in her first book.

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Correction to interview – there are over 50 bumblebee species in the world. 

Here is my interview on The Breeze in Tauranga.

Go to APATA’s website www.apata.co.nz/billboard for more details.

Tauranga Library – Sunday, 8 September from 1pm

Please register for this event by visiting: www.library.tauranga.govt.nz

Tauranga City Libraries and BIOBees invite you to the launch of Bumblebees Have Smelly Feet by Rachel Weston. Bumblebees Have Smelly Feet takes you on an amazing bumblebee discovery, that will help children, and the young at heart, understand the important role bumblebees play in growing our delicious foods and in our ecosystem.

Come along and learn some fascinating buzz facts, information on why bumblebees have whiffy feet, how their bodies work, their super power eyesight, their family life cycle and more. A contained live hive of bumblebees will be on display and books will be available to purchase.