A honeybee colony is one of the few things on earth that behaves like a single animal while being tens of thousands of separate ones. That is the real subject of this book, and it is what stops it being interchangeable with the rest of the series.
The bus becomes a hive, the class becomes bees, and they work outwards through a working colony. Joanna Cole wrote it, Bruce Degen drew it, and it runs the usual three streams at once: the story, the speech balloons, and the hand-lettered notes taped round the edges. Read the notes. A good share of the science is in them.
The science it actually teaches
Most of this shelf is about objects. A body, a planet, a bone. This book is about a system, which is a different kind of science and a harder one to teach a seven year old, and it is why the title sits on our Stealth Science shelf.
Start with the queen, because the book corrects the thing nearly everybody believes. She is not in charge. She lays eggs. There is no bee giving orders and no plan written down anywhere, and the colony still builds, feeds itself, defends the door, keeps the nursery at the right temperature and gets through a winter. All of that comes out of thousands of individuals each following a short local rule. Your child has just met an idea that runs through ants, cells, traffic and markets, and they met it in a picture book about bees.
Then the jobs, which is the part I did not know until I was a grown man. A worker does not have a job. She has a career, and it runs on her age. The young ones stay in and feed the brood and build comb. The middle ones take over guarding and housekeeping. The oldest fly out for nectar and pollen, which is the most dangerous work in the colony and gets done by the bees with the least life left in them. Nobody assigned any of that. It falls out of the way a bee's body changes as she gets older.
The dance is the best thing in the book. A forager finds flowers a long way off, comes home into a dark crowded hive, and by moving on the surface of the comb she passes on which direction to fly and how far to go. Other bees leave, fly out, and arrive at a place they have never been. That is real information moving between animals with no sound and no pointing, and it is one of the genuinely astonishing findings in the whole of animal behaviour.
The comb carries two more. The wax does not come from a flower. Workers make it inside their own bodies and chew it into shape, so the building material is manufactured on site out of food. And the cells are six-sided because hexagons fit together with no gaps and share every wall, which means the most storage for the least wax. That is engineering arrived at without an engineer, and it is the one thing in this book you can show at the table with a pencil and a sheet of paper.
Honey gets explained properly as well. It is nectar with most of the water driven out and enzymes added, fanned in the comb until it thickens into something that will not spoil. Honey is not bee food that happens to be sweet. It is a preserved crop, made deliberately to survive a season when nothing is flowering, and that single fact quietly explains why a hive works itself so hard in July.
The child it lands with
Any child who has stood still and watched a bee work a flower and wondered where she goes next. This is the book that answers it.
The one it really belongs to is the child who likes rules and systems, who lines things up, who wants to know how the whole arrangement fits together rather than what one animal is called. A hive has more moving parts than an eye or a planet, and that child will find new ones on a fourth reading.
Less happy is the child who wants a story with a beginning and an end. This is a tour, not a plot, and it does not pretend otherwise.
One place to stop and talk
The dance is the page to slow down on, and the way to do it is to make it a problem before it becomes a fact.
Stand your child in the middle of the room. Tell them there is a bowl of something they want, outside, somewhere, and that their job is to get everybody else in the house to walk straight to it. They may not speak. They may not point. They may not lead anyone there. Let them fail at it for a minute, because the failing is the point.
Then turn the page. A bee solves that in the dark, on a vertical wall of wax, using an angle and a length of time, and nobody taught her. Whatever your child came up with, the bee's is better, and they will know exactly how much better because they just tried it themselves.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book with one hard edge, and the edge is not on the page. It is what happens afterwards.
A child who reads this wants to go and find a hive. That is the right response and it is also the caution. Honeybees are not aggressive when nobody is bothering them, but a colony defends itself, a sting hurts, and a small number of children react badly enough to need a hospital. If you do not know whether yours is one of them, find out before the interest turns into a plan. If there is a keeper anywhere near you, an hour standing next to a real hive is worth more than any book on this shelf, and it wants arranging by an adult rather than happening behind a shed.
The second thing runs the other way. A child who is already frightened of stinging insects is about to be asked to imagine being inside a hive, in the dark, surrounded. For most children that is the whole fun of it. For a few it is the wrong book this year and the right one next year, and there is no cost to waiting.
Third, small but it always comes up. A honeybee worker that stings a person usually cannot pull her sting back out, and she dies of it. That is true, it is strange, and it surfaces in bee books and bee conversations sooner or later. It is better coming from you at your kitchen table than from another nine year old at the library.
Nothing else in here is heavy. Nobody is hurt, the class comes home, and the tone stays silly the whole way through.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 at The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive. If you get to pick your moment, buy this one in late winter. A child who reads it in February and then goes out in May to watch the first bees working the first flowers has done a piece of real fieldwork without ever being told to do any, and at that point the book stops being a book and turns into a field guide. Nothing else on the Stealth Science shelf has a month attached to it. Buy it out of season and it is still a good book. Buy it in February and it is twice the book.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Inside Your Own Eye: The Magic School Bus and the Senses
The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Magic School Bus Dinosaurs: The Feather Problem
The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Caterflies and Ice: The Book Where Zoey Gets It Wrong
Caterflies and Ice: Zoey and Sassafras #4 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Dragons and Marshmallows: The Science and the Catch
Dragons and Marshmallows: Zoey and Sassafras #1 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
