The Dog Who Saved the Bees - Perfect Picture Book Friday #PPBF

Maria Marshall
Jul 31
4 min read

One of the threats that honey bees face is an incurable disease called foulbrood. A disease which could devastate our food supply. Introducing readers to a STEM profession few know about - beehive inspector - this stunning and touching book explores the trials and determination which created the life-saving partnership of a bee inspector and a rambunctious, sweet, and talented dog.

Book Cover - a woman carrying a leash walks behind a dog as they patrol a row of bee hive boxes.

The Dog Who Saved the Bees

Author: Stephanie Gibeault

Illustrator: David Hohn

Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press (August 1, 2025)

Ages: 5-8

Nonfiction

Themes:

Detection dog, rescued dog, bees, partnership, nonfiction, and biography.

Synopsis:

When an overworked beehive inspector seeks a detection dog to protect bees from a deadly disease, she teams up with a lonely dog who needs a loving home and a purpose.

Cybil Preston needs a dog. But not just any dog. She needs a dog to help her with her work. Cybil is a beehive inspector who works to ensure the health of commercial beehives in Maryland. Hundreds of hives are shipped across the country as farmers need bees to pollinate their crops. Without the bees, there wouldn't be foods like apples, almonds, and strawberries.

But the bees must be healthy to be shipped, and there's a deadly disease, foulbrood, that is highly contagious. If even one infected hive left the state, entire bee populations could be wiped out. Dogs, with their ultrasensitive sense of smell, can sniff out even the tiniest scent of foulbrood in a hive. A well-trained, focused detection dog can inspect 50 hives in 10 minutes. Work that would take Cybil an entire day to do.

When Cybil meets Mack, an unruly and lonely dog, she wonders if she has found her canine colleague. Can rambunctious Mack be trained to meet this important challenge? Readers of all ages will enjoy this warmly illustrated true story of Cybil and Mack as they work to save the bees.

Opening Lines:

The sun shimmered.

The bees buzzed.

Hundreds of hives needed help.

Cybil Preston got to work.

As chief apiary inspector for the Maryland Department of Agriculture,

Cybil guaranteed the health of all the beehives in the state. And right now,

she needed to inspect hundreds of hives before they made a cross-country journey.

Farmers from the East Coast to the West desperately

needed the honey bees to pollinate their crops.

Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough foods like apples,

almonds, and strawberries for people to eat.

What I LOVED about the book:

Lyrically and succinctly, the opening spread presents the enormity of the task, both in size and importance, facing Cybil Preston. The perspective of the softly lit illustration, especially in combination with the title page where five rows of bee hives extend down a hill and off the page in both directions, provides a very visceral feeling of being surrounded by "hundreds of hives." Each of which have to be personally inspected in order to preserve the U.S. crops.

Internal spread - in the early morning yellow glow, a bee inspector stands in a full bee suit, with a clipboard, in the center of three rows of bee hive boxes.

Text © Stephanie Gibeault, 2025. Image © David Hohn, 2025.

I love how David Hohn plays with perspectives. The next spread has the reader looking up from inside the hive as Cybil in her protective gear, gloves, and mask opens the lid of a hive to start her inspection and then moves to a tight zoomed in image of one of the hives frames. Stephanie Gibeault explains the deadly disease foulbrood in a very accessible way and poses the question of how faint a whiff of foulbrood a dog could detect.

In a very emotional and heartfelt scene, the reader joins Cybil in discovering Mack, a "rowdy and wild" dog confined in a garage with "Nobody to play with. Nothing to do." And Mack's discovery of Cybil. Definitely love at first sight for both of them.

Internal spread - on the left, a woman raises a garage door to find a dog, in the dark, miserably sprawled on a pile of blankets, with a crewed up stuffed bear, pillow, and ball next to him. On the right, the woman kneeling with dog in her arms, licking her face, and his tail thumping the ground.

Unfortunately, Cybil finds that Mack was super distracted. Beautifully illustrated by his meandering dotted path weaving throughout the yard, discovering scents he'd never encountered in the garage. But Cybil refused to give up because Mack was Cybil's only hope, and she was his. She slowly turned a game of fetch into a lesson on sitting and focusing, The illustrations do a great job of relaying the passage of time through the change of the seasons from summer through winter as Cybil patiently and sneakily turns Mack's game of fetch into a scent training exercise. It's so much easier to learn, when the learning is fun.

After proving his new-found ability to focus and find a hidden rag in a big warehouse and outside in empty hives to the trainer, Mack and Cybil embarked on a 9-month training. Mack's certification test (find nine foulbrood scented rags) was held on a cold, rainy, and miserable fall day in a junkyard. Cybil worried. "There were so many new sights and smells. Could Mack focus enough to find every rag?" I adore the callback to Mack's earlier meandering with this dotted, purposeful and methodical trail through the junkyard. And cheered when Mack became the only certified foulbrood sniffing dog in the U.S. - definitely worth a cup of whipped cream!

Internal spread - on a dark rainy day, a dog wanders through a junkyard (trail marked by dotted lines), sniffing all the trucks and locating hidden rags with faint "foulbrood" scent on them. On the upper left, the tester and the dog's owner stand in galoshes and raincoats watching the dog.

Now, to see if Mack could actually do the job. I'll leave you all to enjoy the minor setback and touching ending. Wonderful back matter, with photos of Cybil and Mack, explores further into the foulbrood disease, the importance of Mack's job, and "how his nose knows." This is a wonderful nonfiction STEM picture book biography exploring the persistent and patient creation of a very special partnership involved in a nation-wide conservation effort to protect bees and preserve our food supply.

Resources:

Photo collage - on the left, an origami bee. On the right, an image of six of thirty bee craft activities.

have fun making some easy origami bees or some of these 30 bee crafts.

Photo collage of two different ways to make mason bee hotels with recycled items.

make a mason bee hotel (here) and (here).

can you list some other jobs that dogs have? Are there any others that rely just on smell? What is the most unusual job you know about for dogs?

for a picture of Mack, see Vivian Kirkfield's #PPBF blog post.

pair this with the gorgeous Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Eric Rohmann, the humorous Please Please the Bees by Gerald Kelley, and fact packed Bees (National Geographic Kids Readers, Level 2) by Laura Marsh.

If you missed my interview with Stephanie Gibeault on Monday, find it (here).

This post is part of a series of blog posts by authors and KidLit bloggers called Perfect Picture Book Fridays. For more picture book suggestions and resources see Susanna Leonard Hill's Perfect Picture Books.