If Bees Disappeared

by Lily Williams

Lily Williams’s informational picture book uses a what-if scenario to explore how the disappearance of bees could affect flowering plants, animals, food systems, and people. Through accessible explanations and illustrations, it introduces ecological interdependence and encourages readers to consider how they can help protect pollinators.

Big Idea

Small creatures can have far-reaching effects on the living world. Understanding connections among bees, plants, animals, and people helps students recognize why protecting pollinators matters.

Discussion Questions

1.Why might a change in the bee population affect living things that never come near a bee?
2.How do the illustrations help us understand connections that would be difficult to explain with words alone?
3.Which possible consequence of losing bees surprised you most, and what connections explain it?
4.How does imagining a world without bees change the way you think about a garden, playground, or grocery store?
5.What could our class do to support pollinators, and how could we find out whether our action helps?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50–60 minutes, including the read-aloud📦 A copy of If Bees Disappeared, long paper strips or taped sheets, pencils, crayons or markers, index cards, paper flowers, a paper bee, removable paper pollen dots, tape, and chart paper

Learning Goals

Explain how bees help many flowering plants reproduce by moving pollen between flowers.
Describe a supported cause-and-effect chain connecting bees with plants, animals, and people.
Use illustrations and evidence from the read-aloud to explain an ecological relationship.
Create and revise a short illustrated sequence whose page turns communicate connected consequences.
Identify one practical, locally appropriate action that supports pollinators.

Activity Steps

1.Read the book aloud, pausing to identify connections among bees, flowering plants, other animals, and people. Clarify that this is an informational what-if scenario, not an account of bees having already disappeared.
2.Model pollination with paper flowers and a paper bee carrying a removable paper pollen dot. Explain that bees transfer pollen as they visit flowers and that many—but not all—plants depend on animal pollinators.
3.Build a class cause-and-effect chain using cards and arrows. Choose a bee-pollinated plant, such as an apple tree, and distinguish possible effects from claims that every plant or food would disappear.
4.Have students fold a strip of paper into five accordion panels: bee visits, pollination, fruit or seed production, a connected food consequence, and a helpful action. Students draw and write or dictate captions using words such as because, so, and might.
5.Partners read their books aloud, pausing at each fold. They check whether each consequence follows logically and revise one caption or picture to make the connection clearer.
6.Share selected books and make a class list of feasible actions, such as protecting flowering habitat or asking school staff about planting locally appropriate native flowers. Finish with an exit response explaining one bee-to-food connection.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RI.K.7 / RI.1.7 — Use illustrations and text to describe or clarify important information.
ELA: CCSS RI.3.3 — Describe relationships among scientific ideas or events using language related to cause and effect.
ELA: CCSS W.K.2 / W.2.2 — Create informative texts through drawing, dictation, and writing, with expectations adjusted by grade.
Science: NGSS 2-LS2-2 — Develop a simple model that mimics an animal’s role in pollinating plants or dispersing seeds; addressed through the paper-bee model.
Science: NGSS 5-LS2-1 — Support ecosystem-modeling work by tracing selected feeding relationships; the lesson introduces connections rather than fully addressing matter movement.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

If Bees Disappeared offers a useful model of informational writing driven by a speculative question. Although the requested category labels it fiction, the book is best approached instructionally as informational nonfiction using a hypothetical scenario. Its forward movement comes from ecological consequences rather than a conventional character adventure: readers consider how one change could lead to another, widening their attention from bees to the systems that depend on them. In a Pace-Write-Read study, students investigate how an author controls the speed at which readers encounter those connections. A concise explanation can move a reader quickly toward the next consequence, while an illustration invites a slower look at relationships and details. During rereading, ask students where they need time to understand a connection and where anticipation makes them eager to turn the page. Students can transfer this craft to their own illustrated explanations. Younger writers can give each consequence a picture and a dictated sentence; older writers can vary sentence length, place a consequence after a page turn, and use precise qualifiers such as some, many, and could. The goal is not simply to write faster or more dramatically, but to help readers follow an accurate chain of ideas at a purposeful pace.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Track how the explanation moves from bees to wider ecological consequences. Ask where students want to slow down to understand a relationship and where they feel ready for the next effect.
Plot	Treat the what-if progression as an informational story arc rather than a conventional fictional plot. Map the central change, its connected consequences, and the movement toward protecting pollinators.
Prosody	Read an explanatory passage with clear emphasis on its causal connections, then reread it too quickly. Discuss how expression and pauses help listeners understand what depends on what.
Word	Collect scientific vocabulary encountered during the read-aloud, especially terms connected to bees and pollination. Pair each word with a drawing or child-friendly explanation before students use it in their own books.
Concept	Identify interdependence as the organizing concept: a change affecting bees can extend beyond bees themselves. Have students connect every page of their own explanation to that central idea.
Voice & Worldview	Discuss how the explanatory voice encourages readers to care about creatures they might otherwise overlook. Ask how scientific explanation and concern for the natural world work together.
Point of View	Notice that an explanatory narrator guides readers through a hypothetical situation rather than telling a bee’s personal story. Students can try a bee’s-eye version afterward, clearly labeling it as an invented perspective.
Setting & Place	Use the illustrated environments to discuss where bees, flowering plants, and other organisms interact. Connect those environments to a local garden or schoolyard without assuming every pictured species lives nearby.
Original Characters	Bees and other organisms function primarily as participants in an ecosystem, not as invented protagonists with personal goals. Ask students how illustrations can make living things engaging without giving them human thoughts.
Dialogue	Study how explanation can move forward without relying on character conversations. As an extension, students may invent a short exchange between a gardener and a child, keeping scientific claims accurate.
Details	Choose a detail in the words or pictures that helps explain a bee–plant relationship. Ask students to distinguish details that support understanding from details that mainly enrich the scene.
Descriptions	Compare what the text explains with what the illustrations show about organisms and environments. Encourage students to write descriptions that add useful information rather than merely repeat their pictures.
Firsts	Examine how the opening establishes bees and the book’s central what-if premise. Ask students what readers must understand first before they can follow the consequences of bee loss.
Immediacy & Engagement	Discuss why imagining the absence of a familiar insect makes an ecological question feel important. Invite students to connect the book’s ideas to flowers or foods they know.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish illustrated moments that invite close observation from explanations that summarize larger processes. Map the book’s cause-and-effect structure rather than forcing it into a problem-and-solution adventure template.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Ask how wondering about the next consequence creates suspense without a villain. Discuss which connection is surprising and how the author makes that connection understandable.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Treat the disappearance scenario as a hypothetical projection, not a prediction that must occur. Look for forward-looking consequences, and distinguish them from a formal flash-forward or a cliffhanger.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	This picture book uses spreads and page turns rather than chapters. Before selected turns, ask students to predict the next connection, then check how the following spread develops their thinking.
Pace & Creativity	Have students explain the same bee-related connection in one illustrated panel and then in three. Compare how expanding the sequence creates more room for observation and explanation.
Play	Extend the book through a movement model in which students carry paper pollen between paper flowers. Keep this playful exploration distinct from literal bee behavior and avoid handling live bees.
Performance	Perform a short cause-and-effect chain with students holding bee, flower, fruit, and consumer cards. Pause between speakers so the audience can explain each connection before the next consequence.
Personality	Discuss the narrator’s explanatory presence and the visual character of the illustrations. Ask how students can make an informational page feel inviting while keeping its claims precise.
Humor	Ask whether any visual moments feel playful, but do not assume the book relies on jokes. Discuss when a light touch might invite attention and when it could distract from the seriousness of pollinator loss.
Pause	Pause after an important consequence and ask students to explain the missing because between two ideas. This makes the read-aloud’s speed responsive to scientific understanding.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Listen for sound patterns or vivid language that students can actually locate in the text. Contrast those effects with the precision needed to explain pollination and ecological relationships.
Repetition	Look for recurring ideas, language patterns, or visual connections that help readers follow the scenario. Students can use a repeated causal frame in their own writing without presenting it as a quotation from the book.
Rhythm	Listen to how sentence length and page turns shape the read-aloud’s rhythm. Let students test whether a short consequence sentence followed by a fuller explanation makes their own chain easier to follow.
Punctuation	Choose a sentence from the classroom copy and notice how its punctuation groups information. Have students reread their captions with deliberate pauses to check whether the relationships remain clear.
Questions	Use the title’s what-if premise to generate questions about bees, plants, and food. Sort students’ questions into those the book addresses and those requiring further investigation.
Compare-Contrast	Compare a system with healthy bee activity to the book’s imagined system without bees. Remind students that some plants use wind or other pollinators, so the comparison should not imply that all plants would vanish.
Objects	Follow a concrete item, such as a flower or fruit shown in the book, through its ecological relationships. Students can use one pictured object as a visual anchor in their own sequence.
Threes	As a teaching adaptation, summarize one connection in three beats: bee visits, pollination, and fruit or seed production. Check that students do not mistake this classroom pattern for a required structure throughout the book.
Lists	Build a list of organisms or resources connected to bees using examples supported by the read-aloud. Then turn selected list items into connected sentences to show that naming relationships is different from explaining them.
White Space & Negative Space	Inspect a spread for open areas around text and images, considering how they direct attention. In student books, leave enough uncluttered space for readers to identify the main relationship quickly.
Art & Graphics	Read the illustrations as information, asking what they reveal about connections among organisms. Compare a student’s scene drawing with an arrow diagram and discuss what each communicates well.
Interactives & Gamification	Add a teacher-created matching game linking bees, flowering plants, and consumers; this is an extension, not a claimed feature of the book. Award a match only when students can explain the relationship.
Placement	Examine where text sits in relation to the organisms or processes it explains on a selected spread. Students should place captions and arrows close enough to make their own connections unambiguous.
Form	Discuss how a picture book combines a short read-aloud with visual explanations of a large ecological idea. Ask what would change if the same information appeared only as a list or paragraph.
Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough model of a book, not a finished illustrated product. Students can sketch a four-page bee-consequence sequence and test its order before adding polished pictures.
Passion	Discuss how the book directs attention toward the value of bees and ecological care. Invite students to end their own work with an informed, feasible action rather than an unsupported promise to solve the whole problem.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: One Bee Connection, Four Pages. After reading the book, students make a four-page mini-book that explains one possible consequence of fewer bee visits to apple blossoms. Minutes 0–3: Revisit a relevant spread and orally rehearse the connection: bees transfer pollen between blossoms; successful pollination helps apple production; reduced production could mean fewer apples for people or other animals. Clarify that apples also depend on other growing conditions. Minutes 3–5: Fold paper and plan four pages: apple blossoms and bee visits, pollen transfer, possible effects on apple production, and a realistic action to support pollinators. Minutes 5–12: Draw and write one concise caption per page; younger students may dictate or label, while older students include qualifiers such as could or fewer. Minutes 12–16: Partners read aloud, pausing before each turn to predict the next connection. They mark any place that feels rushed or unclear. Minutes 16–19: Revise one page by adding an explanatory detail, shortening a caption, or moving information across a page turn. Minute 19–20: Share one revision and explain how it helps a reader follow the science.

Classroom Activities

If Bees Disappeared: A Connection-Chain Book

Students create accordion books showing a possible chain of consequences if bees disappeared: fewer bee visits, less successful pollination for some flowering plants, fewer fruits or seeds, and less food for some animals or people. They use connected illustrations, arrows, and brief captions to make each relationship clear, then add a final page showing a realistic way to support pollinators. Younger students can dictate captions; older students can qualify claims and explain alternative outcomes.