{"id":5036,"date":"2020-02-06T13:05:44","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T19:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=5036"},"modified":"2020-02-07T09:01:10","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T15:01:10","slug":"honeybee-the-busy-life-of-apis-mellifera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=5036","title":{"rendered":"Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“She grows thinner and slower. She loses her hair. Her wings fray and tatter. Summertime bees do not live long. And Apis is now thirty-five days old. She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.”<\/em>
(Click to enlarge and see spread, including the text, in its entirety)<\/center>
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\nBzz. Bzz. Today, I’ve got some spreads from Candace Fleming’s<\/a><\/strong> and Eric Rohmann’s<\/a><\/strong> newest book for young readers, Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (Neal Porter\/Holiday House, February 2020). Eric also shares some preliminary images and shows us how to un-angry a bee. <\/p>\n

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Fleming and Rohmann bring readers the journey through a life that lasts 35 days \u2014 a honeybee, who emerges from a nest before we even get to the title page spread. She grows, nurses, tends to the queen, assists in building honeycombs and storing nectar that eventually ripens into honey, guards the nest, learns to fly (on the twenty-fifth day of her life, no less) in a dramatic and exhilarating double gatefold spread, and transfers pollen. On the penultimate spread (pictured above), we witness her demise, but on the final spread, we meet a brand-new honeybee, pushing her way into life just as our protagonist did at the book’s start. <\/p>\n

There’s so much to love about this \u2014 the solid purple endpapers; the reverence with which Fleming writes about the work of honeybees, as well as the lyricism in her prose that makes this story really sing; Rohmann’s dramatic, stunning, up-close portraits of the bee at work; and the repetition in the writing that works to great effect. (Fleming builds suspense in the book’s first half by repeatedly asking if the bee is ready to fly, with page turns that reveal it’s not quite time \u2014 that is, until we get to the exquisite double gatefold in which the bee takes off “with the sun just rising and the dew still drying.”) <\/p>\n

In a publicity note, Fleming writes: <\/p>\n

Action requires empathy. Kids, I realized, need to care, <\/em>truly care about honeybees. Simply compiling a list of fascinating facts or presenting the grim statistics [about dwindling bee populations] would not be enough. I needed to emotionally connect young readers with honeybees \u2014 or better yet, with the life of a single honeybee. …<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She certainly meets her goal here. And as the review from the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books<\/em> notes (one of many starred reviews), both author and illustrator personalize, but never anthropomorphize, the bees. (We even learn at the book’s opening that we can call our main character “Apis” for short.) It is a remarkable moment at the book’s close, as we mourn the loss of this one bee. Appended in the book is more information about worker honeybees, including notes about what we can do about declining bee populations. <\/p>\n

I’ll stop talking now and let some art do the talking. First, we hear from Eric. I thank him for sharing. …<\/p>\n

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Eric<\/font><\/strong>: This below is a first drawing. Thinned oil paint on paper. The acid-free paper is first protected by six layers of acrylic gesso and then tinted with thinned burnt umber oil paint.
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\nBelow is the first drawing of the head of Apis mellifera. I\u2019m still attempting to get the head symmetrical, always keeping one eye on the gutter.
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\nThis is the neutral gray underpainting (also known as grisaille). Warm gray oil paint, applied more opaque than the burnt umber drawing underneath.
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\nHere is an almost-completed oil painting:
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\nBelow is the original honeybee from the cover image. There was something wrong, but I could not put my finger on it. I sent the image to a friend, just to show her what I was working on, and she suggested that the bee looked “angry.” That very day, I repainted the antennae.
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\nHere is the final image. I changed the direction of the antennae, and Apis no longer looks like she has angry eyebrows.
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Some Final Illustrations:<\/em><\/font><\/strong><\/center>
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(Click to enlarge)<\/em><\/center>
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“a brand-new honeybee squirms, pushes, chews through the wax cap of her solitary cell and into … a teeming, trembling flurry. <\/em>Hummmmm!”
(Click spread to enlarge)<\/center>
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“Robber bees! They’ve come to steal honey from the nest.
Apis flings herself at one of them. …”<\/em>
(Click spread to enlarge and read text in its entirety)<\/center>
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“At last, on the twenty-fifth day of her life\u2014with the sun just rising
and the dew still drying\u2014she leaps from the nest and …”<\/em>
(Click spread to enlarge; this is the spread that opens into the double gatefold)<\/center>
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“A worker honeybee’s body is made up of three sections …”<\/em>
(Click this backmatter spread to enlarge and read text in its entirety)<\/center>
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* * * * * * *<\/center><\/p>\n

HONEYBEE: THE BUSY LIFE OF APIS MELLIFERA. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by Candace Fleming. Illustrations copyright \u00a9 2020 by Eric Rohmann and reproduced by permission of the publisher, Neal Porter Books\/Holiday House, New York. All preliminary images reproduced by permission of Eric Rohmann.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“She grows thinner and slower. She loses her hair. Her wings fray and tatter. Summertime bees do not live long. And Apis is now thirty-five days old. She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.”(Click to enlarge and see spread, including the text, in its entirety)   Bzz. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-interviews","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}