16 Quotes Tagged: bees

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested.

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

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

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.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

To be successful, one has to be one of three bees - the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in. One success is inherited, and the the next one is earned. While the last one is self-sought, self-served, and happens on its own terms.

On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a head-dress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. ‘But you surely don't need a hat, Aunt Jane! They're only at the end of the garden.’ ‘It is the custom,’ she said, grandly. ‘Put a scarf over your head.’ Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then — ‘I have to tell you,’ she said, formally, ‘that King George V is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,’ she added — as though the bees needed the telling! — ‘everyone has to die’.

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...

Every saint has a bee in his halo.

THE THREE BEES by Suzy Kassem

A young boy once asked
A wealthy beekeeper:
“What is the secret of
Your success?”

The beekeeper simply smiled
And replied:

“To be successful,
One has to be one of three bees:
The queen bee,
The hardest working bee,
Or the bee that does not fit in.
One success is inherited,
And the next one is earned.
While the last one is
Self-sought,
Self-served,
And happens on its own
Terms.”

“And which bee are you?”
Asked the boy.
The beekeeper then wiped
The sweat from his head
And said:
“The last may seem the riskiest,
But the glory of achievement
Is the most rewarding.
Freedom always comes at a high cost,
But only when you are
Your own boss,
Can you truly
Afford it.”

(Suzy Kassem Poetry)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

To be successful, one has to be one of three bees - the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in.