Review of Where Have All the Bees Gone? by Rebecca E. Hirsch

Apples, blueberries, peppers, cucumbers, coffee, and vanilla. Do you like to eat and drink? Then you might want to thank a bee.

Bees pollinate 75 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Around the world, bees pollinate $24 billion worth of crops each year. Without bees, humans would face a drastically reduced diet. We need bees to grow the foods that keep us healthy.

But numbers of bees are falling, and that has scientists alarmed. What's causing the decline? Diseases, pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat are all threatening bee populations. Some bee species are teetering on the brink of extinction.

"Accessible and concise" (Kirkus), this book will teach you about the many bee species on Earth -- their nests, their colonies, their life cycles, and their vital connection to flowering plants. Most importantly, you'll discover what you can do to help.

"If we had to try and do what bees do on a daily basis, if we had to come out here and hand pollinate all of our native plants and our agricultural plants, there is physically no way we could do it. . . . Our best bet is to conserve our native bees." --ecologist Rebecca Irwin, North Carolina State University

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**My thoughts**
If you like bees and have ever wanted to know anything about them, then this is definitely the book for you! It's chock full of all kinds of information you likely have never known about pretty much every kind of bee that exists. Start with the history of their disappearance being noted, the history of us learning about their importance in relation to plants, notes about the different types, to the theories as to why they are disappearing. You even get ideas on how to help conserve the population.

This book appears to be well-researched and contains many expert quotations. It's totally the kind of book that I would have loved to use for research in my school days. You also get lots of great pictures and some diagrams. The author includes extensive research sources and a bibliography, as well as a glossary and plenty of resources for further information.

It is wordy, so I suggest it for older elementary into middle and high school readers.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a requested review copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.