“A work­er bee breaks out of her hon­ey­comb cell and begins a task-filled life in her colony. The ‘teem­ing, trem­bling flur­ry’ of bees with­in the close con­fines of the dark hive is impres­sive­ly por­trayed in Rohmann’s hon­ey-toned illus­tra­tions through extreme close-ups and vary­ing per­spec­tives on bee bod­ies. For the first twen­ty-four days of her life, the bee remains in the hive, tidy­ing up, nurs­ing lar­vae, groom­ing the queen, and per­form­ing oth­er vital tasks, all while devel­op­ing her own strength. With each stage of growth, the text builds antic­i­pa­tion through rep­e­ti­tion: will the next stage be ‘Fly­ing? / Not yet.’ Part­way through the book, on day twen­ty-five, the bee final­ly emerges above a sun­lit mead­ow on a four-page fold­out; she flies into the next stage of exis­tence as a pol­li­na­tor. After ten days of nec­tar col­lec­tion (dur­ing which she pro­duces ‘one-twelfth of a tea­spoon of hon­ey’), the bee dies, and a new bee emerges from a cell. As with the author-illus­tra­tor pair’s Giant Squid, the art and text togeth­er con­vey a holis­tic view of envi­ron­ment and organ­ism, with excel­lent pac­ing through the com­plete bee life cycle. A dia­gram of bee anato­my is append­ed, and a ‘Help­ing Out Hon­ey­bees’ note dis­cussing the impor­tance of hon­ey­bees to human food pro­duc­tion and threats to their exis­tence, with a read­ing list and web­sites, con­cludes the book.” (The Horn Book, starred review, Danielle J. Ford)