> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Weekend Words: Bees
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-bees/
- Published: 2013-05-12T13:00:02.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:20.000Z
- Description: It's pollen season, big time, and Weekend Words turns its attention back to bees.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Beekeepers and the Birdnester" (c. 1568). Pen and India ink, 203 x 309 mm. Staatliche Museen, Berlin. (Image via the Web Gallery of Art) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/05/bees.jpg)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Beekeepers and the Birdnester” (c. 1568), pen and India ink, 203 x 309 mm (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, image via the Web Gallery of Art)

It’s pollen season, big time, and Weekend Words turns its attention back to bees:

> “The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.”  
>  
> **—Ralph Waldo Emerson**

> “Like trains of cars on tracks of plush  
> I hear the level bee:  
> A jar across the flowers goes,  
> Their velvet masonry  
> Withstands until the sweet assault  
> Their chivalry consumes,  
> While he, victorious, tilts away  
> To vanquish other blooms.  
> His feet are shod with gauze,  
> His helmet is of gold;  
> His breast, a single onyx  
> With chrysoprase, inlaid.  
> His labor is a chant,  
> His idleness a tune;  
> Oh, for a bee’s experience  
> Of clovers and of noon!  
>  
> **—Emily Dickinson, “The Bee”**

> “He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly.”  
>  
> **—Emily Bronte, *Wuthering Heights***

> “You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”  
>  
> **—Jean Cocteau**

> “A girl must be like a blossom  
> With honey for just one man.  
> A man must be like honey bee  
> And gather all he can.  
> To fly from blossom to blossom  
> A honey bee must be free,  
> But blossom must not ever fly  
> From bee to bee to bee.”  
>  
> **—Rogers and Hammerstein, “The Song of the King,” *The King and I***

> “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.”  
>  
> **—Marcus Aurelius**