Busy Builders

Gr 3–6—Complex structures built by eight insects and one arachnid are featured in brief, extravagantly illustrated, enormously enlarged entries. Each creature is introduced on an oversize spread: "This is an Organ-Pipe Mud Dauber. Where does it live?" No clues are provided, but the following spread with a cutaway view of the nest or other construction and a dense paragraph of explanation offers a cursory answer to the question. "The Organ-Pipe Mud Dauber (Trypoxylon politum) is a wasp named for the nest of long, narrow, multicolored tubes made of dried mud and often attached to a wall." Some further description of the insect's behavior or its building method is given, but there's no indication of its actual size, its changing form as it lives and matures in the nest, or its geographical location. The Australian Weaver Ant and the African Termite have names offering clues, but the honeybees and some others do live in more nearby places. Munro uses the four-page guessing-game scheme she used in Hatch (Marshall Cavendish, 2011), which introduces different eggs and the birds hatching from them, but the exaggerated views and sketchy, often-difficult explanations make this title more of an album of curiosities. Large and heavy in the hand, the book has bold views that might attract browsers.—Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston