Quotes About Bees

Still, I couldn't let the matter go entirely—T. Ray thinking I was so desperate I would invent an invasion of bees to get attention. Which is how I got the bright idea of catching a jar of these bees, presenting them to T. Ray, and saying, "Now who's making things up?

That night in my bed in the honey house, when I closed my eyes, bee hum ran through my body. Ran through the whole earth. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

The bees came the summer of 1964

Do you think I could keep bees one day?" I asked. August said, "Didn't you tell me this past week one of the things you loved was bees and honey? Now, if that's so, you'll be a fine beekeeper. Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough." The

Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.

July 1, 1964, I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations. "Bees swarm before death," she'd said.

Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about this one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind.

long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing. Missus showed

Some cities in Europe are using every available bit of space to create native gardens meant to feed bees, roadsides and medians, on top of bus stops." She sighed. "I wish we'd do something like that here. We have plenty of unused corners of land to help bees.

The garden flourished that summer because Magnus's mother was determined to feed her family despite the depredations of the distant war. In the fall, there were beans and tomatoes and pickles to can, and jar after jar of applesauce. Mama's hives yielded fresh honey, and then willow skeps were winterized. The bees would not come out until the air warmed and the sun appeared.

Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.

So that the vines burst from my fingers And the bees weighted with pollen Move heavily in the vine-shoots: chirr---chirr---chir-rikk---a purring sound, And the birds sleepily in the branches. ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS!

But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature's do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.

My silk heart's filled with lights, lost bells, lilies and bees, and I'll go far, further than these mountains, further than the seas, close to the stars and I'll say to Christ, Lord, give me back the child's soul I once had

he put his check to the hive. "Remember me," he said, and he made his voice smooth as smoke. "Don't wake up, just listen out in your dreams, bees, and you'll hear.

The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.

There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows.

The world moves fast, and so do the bees. Can we find the stillness to see them?

When I was a kid, they made us write these essays about what Heaven would be like. I went to this Christian school in Texas, and the thing that I wrote was no bees. No bees. No mud. No infirmities.

The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.

These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive," the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written. He goes on to suggest that it "would be a paradoxically anthropocentric mistake to assume that, because bees are more primitive organisms .         .         . there is nothing in common between our pleasure in flowers and theirs.