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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Bees

Many-colored, sunshine-loving, spring-betokening bee! yellow bee, so mad for love of early-blooming flowers!

Professor Wilson.

  • How doth the little busy bee
  • Improve each shining hour,
  • And gather honey all the day,
  • From every opening flower.
  • Watts.

  • Even bees, the little alms-men of spring bowers,
  • Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
  • Keats.

  • Look on the bee upon the wing ’mong flowers;
  • How brave, how bright his life! then mark him hiv’d,
  • Cramp’d, cringing in his self-built, social cell,
  • Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men
  • Lie deep in cities as in drifts.
  • Bailey.

  • The pedigree of honey
  • Does not concern the bee;
  • A clover, any time, to him
  • Is aristocracy.
  • Emily Dickinson.

  • His labor is a chant,
  • His idleness a tune;
  • Oh, for a bee’s experience
  • Of clovers and of noon!
  • Emily Dickinson.

  • Listen! O, listen!
  • Here ever hum the golden bees
  • Underneath full-blossomed trees,
  • At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.
  • Lowell.

    The bee is enclosed, and shines preserved, in a tear of the sisters of Phaëton, so that it seems enshrined in its own nectar. It has obtained a worthy reward for its great toils; we may suppose that the bee itself would have desired such a death.

    Martial.

  • “O bees, sweet bees!” I said; “that nearest field
  • Is shining white with fragrant immortelles.
  • Fly swiftly there and drain those honey wells.”
  • Helen Hunt.

  • The wild bee reels from bough to bough
  • With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,
  • Now in a lily cup, and now
  • Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
  • In his wandering.
  • Oscar Wilde.

  • Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise
  • Their Master’s flower, but leave it having done,
  • As fair as ever and as fit to use;
  • So both the flower doth stay and honey run.
  • Herbert.

  • The careful insect ’midst his works I view,
  • Now from the flowers exhaust the fragrant dew,
  • With golden treasures load his little thighs,
  • And steer his distant journey through the skies.
  • Gay.

  • The little bee returns with evening’s gloom,
  • To join her comrades in the braided hive,
  • Where, housed beside their mighty honeycomb,
  • They dream their polity shall long survive.
  • Charles (Tennyson) Turner.

  • The honey-bee that wanders all day long
  • The field, the woodland, and the garden o’er,
  • To gather in his fragrant winter store,
  • Humming in calm content his winter song,
  • Seeks not alone the rose’s glowing breast,
  • The lily’s dainty cup, the violet’s lips,
  • But from all rank and noxious weeds he sips
  • The single drop of sweetness closely pressed
  • Within the poison chalice.
  • Anne C. Lynch Botta.

  • So work the honey-bees;
  • Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach
  • The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
  • They have a king and officers of sorts;
  • Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
  • Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
  • Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
  • Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
  • Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home,
  • To the tent royal of their emperor;
  • Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
  • The singing masons building roofs of gold;
  • The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
  • The poor mechanic porters crowding in
  • Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
  • The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
  • Delivering o’er to executors pale
  • The lazy yawning drone.
  • Shakespeare.