• Age: 5 to 8
• Grade: k to 3
• Reading age: 6 to 7

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.

Stephanie Gibeault is an award-winning freelance writer who lives just outside Toronto, Canada. As both a biologist and a professional dog trainer, she’s been swarmed by monkeys, grumbled at by gorillas, and covered in fur and drool. Now Stephanie writes books for children that feature tooty humor or science. She’s usually found reading her latest work out loud and laughing at her own silly jokes. She hopes her neighbors can’t hear! Visit her at stephaniegibeault.com and on Twitter @GibeaultWrites.

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David Hohn is the illustrator of Just Like Beverly: A Biography of Beverly Cleary, which garnered starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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