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Imagine you are a handicapped bee with no way of getting around. You are lost and alone until a friend comes along. Can you see what joy that will bring to your heart? The Bee Without Wings brings together Sasha, Molly and Bea into a delightful and fun friendship that will warm your heart. Learn about bees and discover how to recover from loss.
The Basic Details for The Bee Without Wings
Title: The Bee Without Wings
Author: Amberlea Williams
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Pages: 40
Intended Audience: 4-8 year olds
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover
Type: Picture Book
Genre: Bees, Insects, Friendship, Death/Dying, Helping Bees, Bugs
Received: Hardcover
Reviewed for: Raincoast Books
About the Author
Amberlea Williams lives in Ottawa with her husband, son and cat. She loves to illustrate, do freelance design and teach yoga. Her parents encouraged her to go to art school when she was young.
About The Bee Without Wings
Finding a bumble bee without wings in her garden, Sasha is determined to help it survive. This unexpected friendship leads to a summer of fun between Sasha, Molly the cat, and Bea the bee. Bea evens learns you don’t need wings to fly! Bees don’t live long though, so Sasha discovers a meaningful way to honour her friend. Beautifully illustrated, the tale includes an activity for creating a bee pollinator garden, along with information on how to care for early spring bees.
Looking Deeper
Tales of friendship between unlikely allies intrigue all sorts of people, and finding a bee without wings that a young girl doesn’t want to immediately just squash is fantastic. Sasha is a sweet, soft-hearted young girl who takes excellent care of her young bee friend.
You’ll find the text easy to read as you follow along the adventures of these three young friends. From learning how to care for this weak young bee, to finally helping her find her final resting place.
Sasha needed to develop her problem-solving skills. She takes time to observe and then figures out how to help.
I just love the illustrations. They are clear, easy to follow, with a brightness to them that encourages the reader to stay involved.
And before you can blink an eye she had Bea up and flying! Even if it was only a short time before Bea started to fail. The proportions aren’t exactly to scale, but if one kept them true to size it would have been difficult to show Bea’s emotions.
At the close of the book you’ll learn how to care for spring bees, even as we watch Sasha and Molly plant a bee garden. Don’t you just love it when a picture book not only tells a good story, but teaches as well?
Recommendation?
Sasha is a lovely, soft-hearted girl, with excellent problem-solving skills. Can she keep Bea alive and give her a good quality of life? For sure? Can she find a good way to honour her little friend? Definitely.
What do we observe: Sasha has empathy for the bee, Sasha observes her little bee and then uses problem-solving skills to help Bea, accommodates Bea’s failing health, and then figures out how to help other bees.
Can we learn how to help the bees through this story? For sure! This is an great primer for learning how to care for early spring bees. Building a bee garden, providing safe places to get a drink, creating living quarters and much more. An excellent start. I only wish she had provided links or building instructions for making a bee house.
This would be a nice companion book to actually learning about bees as this one focuses more on how we can help our bee companions.
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