Turn This Book Into a Beehive! An Interview with Author, Lynn Brunelle

Review: This is a fascinating book – not only for the fun facts about bees and what makes them so vital to the ecosystem, but that the book has so many amazing activities that kids can do at home with materials they can easily get ahold of. These activities are fully integrated into the content of the book, plus the book provides you with the materials need to create your own beehive. And on a side note, I learned that a hive is manmade while a nest is naturally occurring from this book! This would be a great title to purchase for summer vacation to encourage kids to learn about the world around them and having fun at the same time (which truly is the best way to learn)! This book will be published on May 15th, so mark your calendars or pre-order, you won’t be disappointed!

I had the great honor to interview the author of this books, Lynn Brunelle, thanks to Workman Publishing. Lynn Brunelle is a four-time Emmy-award winning writer for Bill Nye the Science Guy and a regular contributor to NBC’s New Day Northwest TV as a family science guru, Martha Stewart Radio as a family activity consultant and a contributor to NPR’s Science Friday. Check out her answers below for some more great facts about bees!

1. What made you write a book about the amazing world of bees?
   I had read an article about the demise of the honeybee and the hive collapse disorder. It was eye-opening! So much of our food comes to us thanks to the pollination of bees. So if the bees go, so does our food supply. The article was a real downer and didn’t offer any solutions so I went digging for a way for people, especially kids, to be able to make a difference with things they have around the house. This is the book that came from all that research and amazement I discovered about bees.
2. Can you share three cool facts about bees that you learned while writing this book?
   I think when people think of bees we think of honeybees—they live in hives with one queen and they make honey and they sting. The fact of the matter is that there are two groups of bees—social bees and solitary bees. Social bees are the ones that live in group hives, like honeybees and bumblebees. They represent only 2% of all the bees in the world. The other 98% are solitary bees.
   All honeybees are domesticated and were brought here by colonists. In fact honeybees have been domesticated for a loooooooong time! There are images of beekeepers carved into caves, chiseled into Egyptian art, painted on Greek pottery and minted into Roman coins. The solitary bees like Mason Bees are native bees and they’re amazing pollinators.

   With Mason Bees, every girl’s a queen—like a single mom she finds the house—usually a hollow reed or stem or any tube–she gathers food, makes a pile of food, lays an egg on top of the food pile and then gathers mud to spackle a wall. In a good hollow tube, she can make 6-10 little rooms with an egg and a food supply in each one.

3. What’s your favorite food that would disappear if bees became extinct?
   I love-love-love berries. I would miss blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries and kiwis. I would also miss cotton—though I don’t eat it, I do love my jeans and cotton tee shirts!
4. How did you figure out how to create this book in a way that also allows it to become a beehive?
   I love the idea of creating solutions, making art or doing experiments with things you already have around the house. It’s a joy and a challenge for me to find ways to explore in an accessible way without needing to get expensive materials. So when I discovered that Mason Bees liked hollow tubes I looked into rolling up paper. Then I thought maybe we could actually just use parts of the book itself to make a hive.
5. Finish the sentence. Laura, you should have asked me….
   Do all bees sting? NO! In fact the solitary bees are friendly and don’t sting—they will defend themselves if you mess with them, but they use their “stinger” organ to lay eggs so they don’t have venom. These organs are called ovipositors. A sting wouldn’t hurt like a social bee sting. Social bees sting because they have a lot to protect. They have to protect their queen—the one creature that is passing along the genetic information to the next generations. They have to protect their honey. And since the worker bees doing all this protecting are all females, they have ovipositors that double as a powerful stinger. Since they don’t lay eggs, they have a storage of venom that they will use to protect their hive and queen.

 A huge thank you to Workman Publishing and Lynn Bruenlle for spending time with me. I can’t wait to make my own beehive and hang it near my garden!

Title: Turn This Book Into a Beehive!: Start a Living Colony in Your Own Backyard, Plus 19 Other Experiments and Activities to Make You a Bee Master
Author: Lynn Brunelle
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Publication Date: May 15, 2018
Page Number: 288 pgs.