Celebrating National Honey Bee Awareness Month — August 2026
August is here, and with it comes one of our favorite month-long celebrations: National Honey Bee Awareness Month. All August long, The Mojito Reader is dedicating each newsletter to the remarkable world of the honey bee — the science, the stories, the culture, and the books and films that bring it all to life. This week, we’re kicking things off with a video that stopped us mid-scroll and never quite let go.
This Tuesday: Dancing with Bees by Anna Maynard
There are nature films that inform, and there are nature films that move you. Dancing with Bees, by Anna Maynard, belongs firmly in the second category.
Maynard takes viewers inside the hive to witness one of the most astonishing communication systems in the natural world: the waggle dance. When a forager bee discovers a rich source of nectar, she returns to the colony and performs an intricate, figure-eight dance that encodes the direction, distance, and quality of the food source — all without a single word.
What makes this novel exceptional is Maynard’s commitment to making the science feel personal. You feel the warmth of the hive, hear the low hum of thousands of wings — and her narration never condescends. She trusts her audience to be as astonished as she is.
Why We Chose It for August
National Honey Bee Awareness Month was established not just to celebrate bees, but to draw attention to the very real challenges they face: colony collapse disorder, habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and the slow disappearance of the wildflower meadows they depend on. Dancing with Bees does all of this without ever feeling like a lecture. It is advocacy wrapped in wonder.
We believe the best way to inspire someone to care about honey bees is to show them something astonishing about honey bees. This novel does exactly that.
Did You Know? Honey Bee Fun Fact
A single honey bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers on a single foraging trip — and over the course of her entire lifetime, she will produce roughly one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. To fill just one standard jar, it takes the combined effort of around 60,000 bees. That small glass jar on your kitchen shelf represents millions of miles traveled and billions of flowers visited.
Check out our Tuesday Bee Fact The Importance of Bees | 7 Crazy Facts by Kid Conservationist
We’ll be sharing a new honey bee fact every Tuesday in August. Pass them along — the more people who understand these insects, the better off all of us are.
Coming This Thursday
On Thursday, we publish our August book feature: The Cat Who Sniffed Glue by Lilian Jackson Braun. We’ll have a full review, a reading guide, and a few thoughts on why this beloved entry in the Cat Who series feels like the perfect cozy companion for a slow August afternoon. If you haven’t yet met Qwilleran and his remarkably intuitive Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum, Thursday’s issue is the perfect place to start.
See you then.
Blue Mojito Book Reviews · The Mojito Reader · Published Every Tuesday & Thursday
National Honey Bee Awareness Month — August 2026
Comments