There is a hole in the cover, and a bee inside it. Turn the page and the hole becomes part of a new flower, then a hive cell, then the sun over a meadow. The die cut is not decoration here, it is the mechanism: the same opening keeps reappearing as something different, and a child works out that the bee is travelling.

What that carries is real content. Across the book the bee moves from foxglove to rose, dusty with pollen, past a woodland stream, into the hive where the colony works together, and out again into a meadow of poppies. By the end a three year old has been taught pollination without a single sentence that sounds like a lesson.

Britta Teckentrup builds every spread as a multimedia collage, layered paper and print in deep greens, golds and dusk blues. Her meadows look like something you would hang, and adults regularly stop on a page longer than the child does.

Part of the Peek-Through series alongside Tree, Ocean, Moon, Home and Bugs. The rhyming text reads aloud in a few minutes and the pages hold up to being poked at, which is what a die cut book has to survive.