Bees Quotes

“I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“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.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say!" he shouted.
Then I'll find another roof, I thought.
"You understand me?" he said.
"Yes sir, I understand" I said, and I did too. I understand that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

“Unrealistic? I think not, that bee was about to murder me.”
― Devyn Dawson, The Light Tamer

“They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing—oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit.”
― Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind