Maya is born into a hive in the middle of a revolution, and on her very first flight she decides never to go back to carrying honey and making wax: she wants to see the world in bloom. Alone among the grasses, the garden and the lake, she meets a beetle who lives in a rose, a fly called Puck who is always in a hurry, and a good many creatures who would gladly eat her, and has to learn to live on her wits. What she wants most of all is to meet a human being. Waldemar Bonsels published the story in Germany in 1912; it sold in millions and was translated everywhere, long before the cartoon. Forty-eight plates of painting, from Carl Spitzweg to Wilhelm Leibl, gather the small world of the meadow and the open air that Maya crosses on her summer out.
