Our book is about the work that honey bees do for us. The honey bees that go out collecting food and water are all female worker bees. So our honey bee heroine can't be named Digbee or Barnabee.
Her name should be incorporated into the book title, so needs to be catchy, lend itself to be visually interesting, and if we want to add rhyming narrative in the book, that's got to work too.
Lots of possible names didn't inspire us. We discarded Debbee, Busbee, Betsie, Barbee and Phoebee for various reasons. We wanted a name we could have fun with.
Part of our enjoyment in our approach of working together is that we can bat ideas back and forth. We haven't really made a firm decision, it's more that we have settled on a name and title that we've been joking around with, and we haven't come up with anything we like better.
We hope you will like our 'choice', and that it will inspire you to want to find out more about what our bee gets up to.
Our cover will be revealed at the end of next month (April 2023) as that is the deadline for submission to 'Bookseller' magazine, so our decision has to be final by then.
Publication date will be 26th October 2023. The book will be launched at The National Honey Show, 26 to 28 October at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, UK.
In the meantime, over the coming months, more illustrations of our honey bee heroine and her local countryside landscape of flowers and wildlife including work in progress ideas from the artist's sketchbook, by Claire Murthy, will be released here and over on our social media - join us here and on Instagram @saffronwildlifestudio for behind-the-scenes updates!
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