Bees Quotes

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Every saint has a bee in his halo.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Beekeeping is the world’s second oldest profession. The first apiarists were the ancient Egyptians. Bees were royal symbols, the tears of Re, the sun god.

In Greek mythology, Aristaeus, the god of beekeeping, was taught by nymphs to tend bees.

The Bible promises a land of milk and honey. The Koran says paradise has rivers of honey for those who guard against evil. Krishna, the Hindu deity, is often shown with a blue bee on his forehead. The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of Justice and mercy of honey, side by side.

The first voodoo dolls were molded from beeswax; an oungan might tell you to smear honey on a person to keep ghosts at bay; a manbo would make little cakes of honey, amaranth, and whiskey, which, eaten before the new moon, could show you your future.

Sometimes I wonder which of my prehistoric ancestors first stuck his arm into a hole in a tree. Did he come out with a handful of honey, or a fistful of stings? Is the promise of one worth the risk of the other?”
― Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey

“There were bees somewhere---calling out to her, beckoning. She had wandered over to the tree and found the hive, hanging from a branch like a nugget of gold. The bees glimmering, circling. She drew closer, stretched out her arms and grinned as she felt them land, the tickle of their tiny legs against her skin.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“I am sure you understand," Father began, looking past Violet at the wall, "that I cannot allow you back into my house after what you have done. I have arranged for you to be taken to a finishing school in Scotland. You will stay there for two years, and after that I will decide what is to be done with you."
Violet heard Graham clear his throat.
"No," she said, before her brother could open his mouth to speak. "That won't be acceptable, I'm afraid, Father."
His jowls slackened with shock. He looked as if she had slapped him.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I won't be going to Scotland. In fact, I won't be going anywhere. I'm staying right here." As she spoke, Violet became aware of a strange simmering sensation, as though electricity was humming beneath her skin. Images flashed in her mind---a crow cutting through the air, wings glittered with snow; the spokes of a wheel spinning. Briefly, she closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling until she could almost see it, glinting gold inside her.
"That is not for you to decide," said Father. The window was open, and a bee flitted about the room, wings a silver blur. It flew near Father's cheek and he jerked away from it.
"It's been decided." She stood up straight, her dark eyes boring into Father's watery ones. He blinked. The bee hovered about his face, dancing away from his hands, and she saw sweat break out on his nose. Soon it was joined by another, and then another and another, until it seemed like Father---shouting and swearing---had been engulfed in a cloud of tawny, glistening bodies.
"I think it would be best if you left now, Father," said Violet softly. "After all, as you said, I'm my mother's daughter.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“My father taught me that beekeeping is both a burden and a privilege. You don’t bother the bees unless they need your help, and you help them when they need it. It’s a feudal relationship: protection in return for a percentage of the fruits of their labors.

He taught me that if a body is easily crushed, it develops a weapon to prevent that from happening.

He taught me that sudden movements get you stung.

I took these lessons a bit too much to heart.”
― Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey

“Being invisible is actually so uncomfortable, it's like bees are crawling inside my skin. I'm really over it.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Honeybees possess amazing numerical skills that rival those of many vertebrates. Honeybees have a reputation of being insect geniuses: not only can they enumerate and order numbers, but they also possess elaborate working memory to ponder about upcoming decisions, understand abstract concepts such as 'sameness' and 'difference', and learn intricate skills from other bees. And they achieve all of this with fewer than one million neurons.”
― Andreas Nieder, A Brain for Numbers: The Biology of the Number Instinct

“It took her a moment, as always, to acclimate to the roar that surged in her mind's ears, a sound she had attempted to describe to her sister and mother more than once but never could. Like being filled with golden bees that were all actually one bee, which was actually a field of shining wheat rustling beneath a blazing sun. It was a sound but not a sound. It was in her ears but it was in her head. It was like tasting a feeling and the feeling was power.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Crystals of old honey on her body's tongue, long hardened, were loosening in the warmth of her spilling blood, turning from grain to syrup, a slow sweet hum of wings unfurling from deep within her and looping outward, solid and multitudinous, the comb in her chest and the workers in her veins, and the hive all around her.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“The ocean at sunset, a sea of honey holding wax ships sailed by bees”
― Michelle Cuevas

“The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over; and joyful bees swarmed countrysides to sting maiden ladies.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree

“I speak the language of the bees. My words are floral and flowery.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“If you are an aspiring honey farmer, I have a documentary you NEED to watch. It's called The Beekeeper, and it stars Jason Stratham. It is the Mission Impossible of apiculturist culture.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“Summer, when apple blossoms bloom, roses rise, lilacs lie, dandelions are dandy, and daisies are doozies, a time when flies fly, bugs bug, bees be, swallows swallow, and ducks duck.”
― GLEN NESBITT, SUS: Short Unpredictable Stories

“The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside? There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds,—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. “Columella tells us,” says he, “that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.” Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this; but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done.
--From "A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Humans are the only species that destroy anything and everything they do not have a need for or don't understand!”
― June Stoyer

“A tongue stings stronger than a bee.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Bees are a recurring symbol of the Merovingians and the humming or buzzing sound of bees is likened to supersensible “sounds” experienced by many Sufis as they enter spirit realms.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“There are eleven bees on the Merovingian Coat of Arms because eleven is the number of the sephirah on the Tree of Life, called Daath, which provides an opening into the Abyss or Void.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“If only thy eyes flutter once, the bees lose their direction and the fighting men their aim!”
― Avijeet Das

“My mind is on the poem I'm writing—
language pollinated, packed neatly
into hexagonal cells.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson, But Still She Flies: Poems and Paintings

“Surround yourself with bees even if they sting.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Eat bees and you will have a stinging appetite.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Requiem For A Bee…

I do not know
the cause of death,
nor do I know
the hour…

That brought you here
to garden’s rest,
your noble life
expired…

Were battles done
both lost and won,
for distant winged
power?

Unknown to me
your sovereign be,
the queen of all
my flowers…”
― M P Ceran

“The morning sun drew up the moisture and made the country smell of earth. I passed an ancient elm half in sun, half in shadow. Its knots looked like gargoyles and its bark like dried lava. But the limbs were covered with ivy. The bunched ivy buds, like tiny drumsticks, were some of them smooth, others bristling with flower. It was the hum which drew my attention to the tree. Then I saw the bees, their wings filmy as they flew in through the sunlit leaves. The sun shimmered on the outlines of their tawny bodies as they pulsated, taking the last nectar of the year. There was a sudden flicker of red where an admiral butterfly also partook of the feast. Flies were darting about, but more aimlessly. They seemed to have nothing to do but dance their last sunny hours away in a frenzy. But the bees were hard at work getting provisions of which they are very short after the wet summer.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

“If the butterflies don’t dance,
the ants don’t march,
and the bees don’t come in a swarm —
that’s it.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Let us be grateful
for the bees and fireflies—
small wonders
that keep the world
blooming and glowing,
our tiny guardians
of life and light.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“He looked down at the entrance again. The bees, returning home with pollen on their legs, were pushing and shoving one another, each trying to get inside before the others.

"Come now, don't act like people," he reproached them.”
― Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees

“Work is pleasant there, and from flowers and sweet herbs the foundations of the new hive are laid.

What indeed is a honey hive except a sort of camp? For these enclosures the bee-wax of the bees is laid up. What four-walled houses can show so much skill and beauty as the frame-work of their combs shows, in which small round apartments are supported by sticking one to the other? What architect taught them to fit together six-sided chambers with their sides undistinguishably equal? To suspend thin wax cells inside the walls of their tenements? To compress honey-dew and make the flower-granaries to swell with a kind of nectar?”
― T.H. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century