Sweetness and light. The author describes how the Roman poet Horace once stated that the aim of literary expression should be "to blend in one [work] the delightful and the useful." Reading this book, the author's co-mingling with her bees throughout her life, her reflections on such and the changes that her own life made and the bees as they went about changing sunlight and earth into sweetness was very much delightful and useful. My intent, as I go through my own change from self-imposed separateness with the world into becoming more fully part of it is to have my own hive of bees (or two) and see if I can't learn from the experience as well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that if the stars were to come out just once in the entire history of the world, everyone would fall over themselves getting outside to see. Honey bees are a part of the working natural world that we take so much for granted, and perhaps by knowing just a small piece of the mysterious world we might remember that we ourselves are a part of both the minute honey dance and the larger unending spin of the universe as well.