Bee Buzz Quotes

You make me smile like the sun, fall out bed, sing like a bird, dizzy in my head. Spin like a record crazy on a sunday night. You make me dance like a fool, forget how to breath, shine like the sun buzz like a bee, just the thought of you can drive me wild. Oh you make me smile. -Uncle Kracker-

She is young enough to carry fear with her without letting it into her heart. Without being scared. She wears her fear lightly, like a veil, aware that there are dangers but letting the crackling awareness hover around her. It does not sink in, it buzzes in excitement like a swarm of invisible bees.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.

A bee is never as busy as it seems; it's just that it can't buzz any slower.

Sex talk? You mean the bee and the flower sex conversation? Your parents should have taken care of that a long time ago. Mine did." She elbowed him. "No, you bozo, I meant the safe-sex conversation where the bee explains in detail to the flower how he's always worn a raincoat while buzzing around, and how he'd never gotten entangled with dubious pollen.

Would you like some warm Spring pie? Then, take a cup of clear blue sky. Stir in buzzes from a bee, Add the laughter of a tree. A dash of sunlight should suffice To give the dew a hint of spice. Mix with berries, plump and sweet. Top with fluffy clouds, and eat!

The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again... the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.

If you let words go buzzing out of your mouth like bees, she always told me, they will come back and sting you.

I am sad because I love you, because I love you so much, and because I am not a bee to buzz with you lightly. I am not a flower, not a tree, not a rain-hewn stone. I am not a storm or a cresting wave, not a thorn or a vine. I am not the sun stinging the water, not the moon on the snow. I am not a star in the dark. I am not the dew-wet wind, not the cloud-stained dawn. I am only a girl, a small, plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?

Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.

I’m quietly sipping my coffee, sitting on the deck, settled in to my little jungle of herbs and buzzing bees, letting my thoughts wander, soaked in the warmth of the rising sun. Breathing in and out the soft air filling the moment with fluids of peace.

In the past, people around the world heard the buzzing of bees as voices of the departed, a murmured conveyance from the spirit world. This belief traces back to the cultures of Egypt and Greece, among others, where tradition held that a person's soul appeared in bee form when it left the body, briefly visible (and audible) in its journey to the hereafter...Nobody knows the exact sequence of events that led to the beginning of bees, but everyone can agree on at least one thing: we know what it sounded like.

She felt happy and wondered if she'd ever felt this happy before. The gold light, the falling seeds, the dancing bees... it was all one thing. This was the opposite of the dark desert. Here, light was everywhere and filled her up inside. She could feel herself here but see herself from above, twirling with a buzzing shadow that sparkled golden as the light struck the bees. Moments like this paid for it all.

Bees buzzed in the bean blossoms. And the sun beat down on the upturned shell of Om. There is also a hell for tortoises. He was too tired to waggle his That was all you could do, waggle your legs. And stick your head out as far as it would go and wave it about in the hope that you could lever yourself over.

Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some though that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree- gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following, a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds' music, and wherever Edmund's eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks. "Faster! Faster!" said the Witch. There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed crossed their path.

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper. He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.

What is it?” “Something with which to penetrate you.” “But you can penetrate me now. As often as you like.” “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore other options.” “Hmm,” I said. “Soooo instead of diamonds or shoes, you got me a . . .” I stared at him, and waited for him to reveal the nature of his present. He grinned. “Buzz, buzz, Ellie Bee.

What is the Imago Dei, the Image of God? It’s a hive. God is the total hive, and we are all the hive cells. We are all mind bees, buzzing in our Singularity.

My mind feels like a beehive without the buzz.

the entertainments of the fashionable world are collections of flowers which attract inconstant butterflies, famished bees, and buzzing drones.

Beehive" Within this black hive to-night There swarm a million bees; Bees passing in and out the moon, Bees escaping out the moon, Bees returning through the moon, Silver bees intently buzzing, Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees. Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb, And I, a drone, Lying on my back, Lipping honey, Getting drunk with silver honey, Wish that I might fly out past the moon And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

She wears her fear lightly, like a veil, aware that there are dangers but letting the crackling awareness hover around her. It does not sink in, it buzzes in excitement like a swarm of invisible bees.

Keepers must have spirit and keep it aloft. They are made keepers because they understand why we are here. Why it matters. Because they understand the stories. They feel the buzzing of the bees in their veins.

If Stella glanced over her shoulder, she'd see grief, depression, and loss. But when she looks forward, there's Elizabeth. The bees under Stella's skin, her bones, and her heart start to buzz and hum. She's alive now and actually living. Maybe that feeling was simply hope, and it was fluttering inside her all along.

Sophia stood staring blankly up the stairs for an entire minute before it dawned on her that he'd used the kiss to befuddle her. Blast it all! She fumed to herself as she walked to the front window and stationed herself there. Time went by. The clock ticked. A bee buzzed against the windowpane. Dust settled. After thirty minutes had passed, Sophia had had enough. She gave the empty lane one last glance, then went upstairs.

Even with the windows up she could smell the thick, spiky aroma of cut grass and the distant hum of a lawnmower somewhere down the street. It was a sad hum, though, like the buzzing of a bee that had lost the desire to make honey.

Lady Gregory, in a note to her play Aristotle’s Bellows, writes: Aristotle’s name is a part of our folklore. The wife of one of our labourers told me one day as a bee buzzed through the open door, “Aristotle of the Books was very wise, but the bees got the best of him in the end. He wanted to know how they did pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and thought he would watch them, but when he put his eye to the glass, they had covered it with wax, so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed until then. The bees beat him that time surely.

I sat at my bedroom window after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-colour crisscross of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window's netting. I heard Papa walk upstairs to his room for his afternoon siesta. I closed my eyes, sat still, waiting to hear him call Jaja, to hear Jaja go into his room. But after long, silent minutes, I opened my eyes and pressed my forehead against the window louvers to look outside.9

Silence. I'm sure that many hearing people, especially those who don't know the deaf, imagine our lives are filled with silence. That's not true. If my mind and heart are full of energy and fun, and I'm looking ahead with excitement, I don't feel silent at all. I buzz like a bee in good times. Only in bad times, when I am numb and full of sadness, does everything turn silent. Like out house with just Mama and me in it.

The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another chance. It was his addled understanding of the rules of warfare that the marksman should be given a second chance.

He thrust his hand in the air and summoned his sword of pure white flame. The gods and goddesses cowered. Throwing his head back and laughing, Surt grew to his full giant size. “You minor, forgotten, pathetic deities! So easy to bend to my will. Not one of you would dare to defy me!” I chose that moment to shape-shift into a bee, buzz up Surt’s teeny-tiny nose, and jab him with my stinger. With a howl of pain, Surt dropped his sword and shrank to his previous size. I changed into my true form. “I dare.” I whipped one end of my golden garrote around his neck and yanked it tight. Then I snatched up his flame sword and with one upward flick, sliced off his pubescent nose. “Jack and Magnus send their regards.” Surt lunged for me. I transformed into a bighorn sheep and head-butted him right where his nose used to be. Then I changed back to human, tightened the garrote until his eyes bulged, and threatened him with his own sword. “Come at me again,” I warned, “and you’ll regret it.” I surveyed the stunned deities. “If one einherji can do this, imagine what all of us can do. And will do, come Ragnarok. We are not destined to win, but we will fight with honor. We would welcome you on our side of the fight. But, if you must side with him”—I gave the garrote a vicious tug and was rewarded with a gurgle from Surt—“know this: I will personally hunt you down on the Last Battlefield of Vigridr and see that you are sent straight to Ginnungagap. The choice is yours.” The deities vanished.

The marching men woke up fast when they heard sniper fire from a line of woods ahead. The point man for one of the platoons was shot in the head and killed instantly. The sniper killed two more men before he was seen to leap from a foxhole and run away. He moved too fast for anyone to get a bead on him.27 As they pressed forward the volume of fire increased. To Wallace it sounded like bees buzzing around him. He started to swat at them, and then noticed that all of his buddies were flat in the mud. He hit the deck.

Style is not how you write. It is how you do not write like anyone else. * * * How do you know if you're a writer? Write something everyday for two weeks, then stop, if you can. If you can't, you're a writer. And no one, no matter how hard they may try, will ever be able to stop you from following your writing dreams. * * * You can find your writer's voice by simply listening to that little Muse inside that says in a low, soft whisper, "Listen to this... * * * Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. * * * Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. * * * There are many fine poets writing for children today. The greatest reward for each of us is in knowing that our efforts might stir the minds and hearts of young readers with a vision and wonder of the world and themselves that may be new to them or reveal something already familiar in new and enlightening ways. * * * The path to inspiration starts Beyond the trails we’ve known; Each writer’s block is not a rock, But just a stepping stone. * * * When you write for children, don't write for children. Write from the child in you. * * * Poems look at the world from the inside out. * * * The act of writing brings with it a sense of discovery, of discovering on the page something you didn't know you knew until you wrote it. * * * The answer to the artist Comes quicker than a blink Though initial inspiration Is not what you might think. The Muse is full of magic, Though her vision’s sometimes dim; The artist does not choose the work, It is the work that chooses him. * * * Poem-Making 101. Poetry shows. Prose tells. Choose precise, concrete words. Remove prose from your poems. Use images that evoke the senses. Avoid the abstract, the verbose, the overstated. Trust the poem to take you where it wants to go. Follow it closely, recording its path with imagery. * * * What's a Poem? A whisper, a shout, thoughts turned inside out. A laugh, a sigh, an echo passing by. A rhythm, a rhyme, a moment caught in time. A moon, a star, a glimpse of who you are. * * * A poem is a little path That leads you through the trees. It takes you to the cliffs and shores, To anywhere you please. Follow it and trust your way With mind and heart as one, And when the journey’s over, You’ll find you’ve just begun. * * * A poem is a spider web Spun with words of wonder, Woven lace held in place By whispers made of thunder. * * * A poem is a busy bee Buzzing in your head. His hive is full of hidden thoughts Waiting to be said. His honey comes from your ideas That he makes into rhyme. He flies around looking for What goes on in your mind. When it is time to let him out To make some poetry, He gathers up your secret thoughts And then he sets them free.

long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing. Missus showed

The days were sinking into the summery sunshine, flowery blossom, twinkling of colorful butterflies, buzzing bees, and happy singing of birds.

It created a murmur of voices, from which no single word could be discerned. Instead, it synthesized the sound of bees buzzing around in a mad swarm, angered by a breach of their hive.

It was very quiet here on the mountainside, but, quiet in the of hills and forests. A quiet that wasn't silent at all, but composed of constant tiny sounds. It was small buzzing in the gorse bush nearby, of bees working the yellow flowers -dusty with pollen, far below was the rushing of the burn, a low note echoing the wind above stirring leaves and rattling twigs sighing past the jutting boulders.

The moment he leaves, the bees are back. Buzzing. I breathe in and feel their tiny feet in my bronchi. Buzz. Wings beeting in my alveoli. Flutterbuzz. [...] Flutterflutterzzzzzzzzbuzzzzzz. I have to do something to make it stop. I have to feel something simple. This-- flutterflutterflutterbuzzzzz-- is too complicated. Too confusing. I want to feel something about which there can be no argument or debate. Soemthing about which everything will be known. Here. Now. Something that will make all the rest stop. There is an exquisite and audible pop when the hooked tip of the center tine in the fish fork punctures the fat purple vein.

And in the same way, I’ve always given my best energy to things outside myself, believing that I’d be fine, that I was a workhorse, that I didn’t need special treatment or babying or, heaven help me, self-care. Self-care was for the fragile, the special, the dainty. I was a linebacker, a utility player, a worker bee. I ate on the run, slept in my clothes, worshiped at the altar of my to-do list, ignored the crying out of my body and soul like they were nothing more than the buzz of pesky mosquitoes.

God designs that we should enjoy ourselves. I do not believe in a religion that makes people gloomy, melancholy, miserable and ascetic. . . . I should not think there was anything great or good associated with that, while everything around, the trees, birds, flowers and green fields, were so pleasing, the insects and bees buzzing and fluttering, the lambs frolicking and playing. While everything else enjoyed life, why should not we? But we want to do it correctly and not pervert any of these principles that God has planted in the human family.

Yo make me smile like the sun, fall out of bed, sing like a bird, dizzy in my head, spin like a record, crazy on a sunday night. You make me dance like a fool, forget how to breath, shine like gold, buzz like a bee. Just the thought of you can drive me mad. Oh you make me smile

This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air. "When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free. As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms.

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone.

But when melody wells up in thrushes' throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery's drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric's glad in spite of all. Yet sometimes too he's sad in spite of all, God knows, for there are other voices than the poor's.

The days were sinking into the summery sunshine, flowery blossom, twinkling of colorful butterflies, buzzing bees, and happy singing of birds; while the nights kept charming with warm winds under the clear skies full of stars, mysteriously shining from incomprehensible spaces of the boundless Universe.

The night people, people like her, had melted back into their hiding places. Now the city was ruled by the day people. The sun was only just beginning to light up the world but already there were busy bees everywhere. Buzz, buzz, buzz out of my way, I have a life to live. I am important. I am someone special. People need me. The world needs me. Buzz, buzz, buzz. The people who had somewhere to go and something to do took brisk steps through the station. They walked with their elbows out, making sure no one got in their way. They were all talking into their phones, even at such an early hour. Making plans and exchanging ideas.

Lo, ’tis autumn; Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages, with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind; Where apples ripe in the orchards hang, and grapes on the trellis’d vines;* (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines? Smell you the buckwheat, where the bees were lately buzzing?)*

Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls become like the buzzing of bees. from behind the battlements on which the banner of speech has been raised, the sound of its drums are heard. In the precincts where its march reverberates, kings shake in their boots. The Master of Speech smashed to pieces many insurmountable walls, in the face of which Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many others despaired or retread; and the pen of Speech, imparting and compliance, was saluted and praised.

But even as he reached out to cup he face he heard an angry buzzing, and a huge black bee dive-bombed him from out of nowhere. With an oath, Thomas jumped back, swatting ineffectually at the persistent insect. As his left foot came down he turned his ankle and nearly fell. Alexandria’s hand covered her mouth in horror. Aidan, stop it right now! I cannot imagine what you are accusing me of, Aidan returned innocently from the living room. But I have not done anything. He smiled and moved slowly toward her. Yet. “Marie!” In a panic, Alexandria called out as loudly as she could. Aidan laughed as the housekeeper hurried in. Little coward, run while you can. Though they were half a room apart and Marie was squarely between them, Alexandria felt the brush of his fingers on her skin, her face, her throat. They trailed lower, feather-light, to touch the aching swell of her breast before the sensation was gone. “What is it, Alexandria?” Marie asked, her hands on her hips, glaring at Aidan. He held up a placating hand, laughing. “I am innocent. I was a perfect gentleman to her visitor.” “He spilled Thomas’s coffee, made him sneeze, smeared whipped cream over him, and chased him with a bee,” Alexandria accused. While Marie struggled to keep a straight face, Alexandria delivered a final outrage. “And he was going to wither my flowers.” “Aidan!” Marie reprimanded sharply, but there was laughter in her eyes.

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.

Hell, they’d say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt’s getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to conceal. It went all over town, this talk, like a swarm of bees, settling down lazily on polite afternoon sun porches to rise once more and settle down again with a busy murmur among cautious ladylike foursomes on the golf course, buzzing pleasurably there amid ladylike whacks of the golf ball and cautious pullings-down of panties which bound too tightly. Everybody knew about their affair and everybody talked about it, and because of some haunting inborn squeamishness it would not have relieved Loftis to know that nobody particularly cared.

There’s language to the woods and it’s speaking to those capable of listening, to ears taught to decode meanings mild or malignant. Geese flying, bees buzzing. Howl of a wolf, height of the clouds, face of the moon, colour of the night and the morning sky, movement of game, snowfall heavy or light — things mostly lost on most people. Where others heard the winds in the maples, the trapper smelled the sap on the breeze. A wind veered northerly and where another might think the evening cold, he knew frost was coming early and the temperatures would stay cold for a week and the bears would feed heavily before the berry bushes died and the deer would be more active at dusk, at dawn. Inflections of the forest, cadence of the wilderness, language of the North.

These stories of grit are one kind of data, and they complement the more systematic, quantitative studies I’ve done in places like West Point and the National Spelling Bee. Together, the research reveals the psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. There are four. They counter each of the buzz-killers listed above, and they tend to develop, over the years,

overrun with blooming wildflowers, between which bees buzzed like drunken men, almost colliding into one another. The afternoon so warm and full of the gentle sounds of nature’s humming that I believed, for a moment, I was the poor relation in an Edith Wharton novel, ushered into luxury for the first time, already terrified of the day it might fade but desperate to experience it to the fullest while I could.

The boldness and strength and happiness that were natural to me and to which I was denying their natural outlet refused to be denied and to be made sickly and fearful, and they poured through my veins then in an action of delight that was healthy and bold and strong. I forgot who or where I was and I made a sort of buzzing, humming noise like a top spinning or a bee. I felt a vibration like music all through me as if my blood were actually singing. And as though I were driven by that music which was formless yet felt as if it had the force of a dynamo. I crouched over my paper and held my pencil slavishly quick and intense, ready to serve this marvelous buzzing happiness at the moment when like surcharged atmosphere it should condense and form precious words that would drop onto my paper from the end of my pencil.

After we had loaded the last one, I backed the pickup around and drove down the twisting road to the big truck. As we rounded the final curve, we noticed there was a strange pickup parked near the U-Haul. Two men got out of it and looked around furtively, but did not see us. They tiptoed over to the truck, their curiosity piqued by an apparently abandoned U-Haul. They tried the sliding back door gingerly, and found it would open. They gave it a push. The loose bees inside rushed out toward the light and enveloped the two men in a furious buzzing cloud. The men were both heavy, with ample beer bellies, but they ran like jackrabbits to their pickup and drove off at top speed, careening from one side of the road to the other as they tried to brush bees from their heads. I’ll wager that is the last time either of them meddled with an abandoned truck.

Change blows through the branches of our existence. It fortifies the roots on which we stand, infuses crimson experience with autumn hues, dismantles Winter’s brittle leaves, and ushers Spring into our fertile environments. Seeds of evolution burst from their pod cocoons and teardrop buds blossom into Summer flowers. Change releases its redolent scent, attracting the buzz of honey bees and the adoration of discerning butterflies.

The narrow bed with its purple, red, and green quilt, the bedside table with its jar of rocks, piled books. The porcelain basin near the window where she washed her face, the pitcher with the brown rose painted on it, the large crack like a vein in the bottom of the basin. The apricot orchard, the buzzing bees like a haze in spring. The barn—the smell of hay and manure, grease, old leather. The sun streaming through the slats. The mule’s nose in her palm.

Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below; there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.

VIII. White Bee" White bee, you buzz in my soul, drunk with honey, and your flight winds in slow spirals of smoke. I am the one without hope, the word without echoes, he who lost everything and he who had everything. Last hawser, in you creaks my last longing. In my barren land you are the final rose. Ah you who are silent! Let you deep eyes close, There the night flutters. Ah your body, a frightened statue, naked. You have deep eyes in which the night flails. Cool arms of flowers and a lap of rose. Your breasts seem like white snails. A butterfly of shadow has come to rest on your belly. Ah you who are silent! Here is the solitude from which you are absent. It is raining. The sea wind is hunting stray gulls. The water walks barefoot in the wet streets. From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick. White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul. You live again in time, slender and silent. Ah you who are silent!

His breath fell in a warm, even rhythm on the curve of her cheek. “Some people think of the bee as a sacred insect,” he said. “It’s a symbol of reincarnation.” “I don’t believe in reincarnation,” she muttered. There was a smile in his voice. “What a surprise. At the very least, the bees’ presence in your home is a sign of good things to come.” Her voice was buried in the fine wool of his coat. “Wh-what does it mean if there are thousands of bees in one’s home?” He shifted her higher in his arms, his lips curving gently against the cold rim of her ear. “Probably that we’ll have plenty of honey for teatime. We’re going through the doorway now. In a moment I’m going to set you on your feet.” Amelia kept her face against him, her fingertips digging into the layers of his clothes. “Are they following?” “No. They want to stay near the hive. Their main concern is to protect the queen from predators.” “She has nothing to fear from me!” Laughter rustled in his throat. With extreme care, he lowered Amelia’s feet to the floor. Keeping one arm around her, he reached with the other to close the door. “There. We’re out of the room. You’re safe.” His hand passed over her hair. “You can open your eyes now.” Clutching the lapels of his coat, Amelia stood and waited for a feeling of relief that didn’t come. Her heart was racing too hard, too fast. Her chest ached from the strain of her breathing. Her lashes lifted, but all she could see was a shower of sparks. “Amelia … easy. You’re all right.” His hands chased the shivers that ran up and down her back. “Slow down, sweetheart.” She couldn’t. Her lungs were about to burst. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t get enough air. Bees … the sound of buzzing was still in her ears. She heard his voice as if from a great distance, and she felt his arms go around her again as she sank into layers of gray softness. After what could have been a minute or an hour, pleasant sensations filtered through the haze. A tender pressure moved over her forehead. The gentle brushes touched her eyelids, slid to her cheeks. Strong arms held her against a comfortingly hard surface, while a clean, salt-edged scent filled her nostrils. Her lashes fluttered, and she turned into the warmth with confused pleasure. “There you are,” came a low murmur. Opening her eyes, Amelia saw Cam Rohan’s face above her. They were on the hallway floor—he was holding her in his lap. As if the situation weren’t mortifying enough, the front of her bodice was gaping, and her corset was unhooked. Only her crumpled chemise was left to cover her chest. Amelia stiffened. Until that moment she had never known there was a feeling beyond embarrassment, that made one wish one could crumble into a pile of ashes. “My … my dress…” “You weren’t breathing well. I thought it best to loosen your corset.” “I’ve never fainted before,” she said groggily, struggling to sit up. “You were frightened.” His hand came to the center of her chest, gently pressing her back down. “Rest another minute.” His gaze moved over her wan features. “I think we can conclude you’re not fond of bees.

Throw the word “bargain” around a few times, and people will swarm the tiredest old dreck like bees in search of a new hive. Or maybe locusts, ready to strip the place bare. They even buzzed like swarming insects. Voices raised in conversation and laughter, plus the occasional shrieks of a tired child, formed a background roar that still failed to drown out the tired tinkle of Christmas music piped over the top. I’d only been here ten minutes and already I’d heard White Christmas twice. Two times too many in my book.

He was anxious to reach the end of his long journey. And he arrived, concentrating on swinging his sharp blade like a pendulum, hypnotized by the rhythm, cutting his way through the thickest bushes without being able to see past the thorny branch in front of him, and the next, and then the next, and then the next, until suddenly there were no more: just his bees’ treasure. And his bees were there, waiting for him. You’re here. You’re here, they said to him, buzzing around him. Look. Touch. Smell. Here. Take it. Take it.

SIDDHARTHA LEARNED SOMETHING NEW ON every step of his path, for the world was transformed, and his heart was enchanted. He saw the sun rising over the mountains with their forests and setting over the distant beach with its palm-trees. At night, he saw the stars in the sky in their fixed positions and the crescent of the moon floating like a boat in the blue. He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, rocks, herbs, flowers, stream and river, the glistening dew in the bushes in the morning, distant high mountains which were blue and pale, birds sang and bees, wind silverishly blew through the rice-field. All of this, a thousand-fold and colourful, had always been there, always the sun and the moon had shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible.

Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. he watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.

It was on this day, during this terrible and wonderful run, that a thought occurred to me, a thought which has never left me" I've always considered the question to be. "Why am I alive? Why am I here? What’s the point of me?? And to that I say WHO CARES! FORGET THE WHY. YOU ARE IN A RAGING FOREST FULL OF BEAUTY AND AGONY AND MAGICAL GRAPEY BEVERAGES AND LIGHTNING STORMS AND DEMON BEES. THIS IS BETTER THAN THE WHY. I run because I seek that clarity. Maybe it’s superficial. Maybe its’s just adrenaline and endorphins and serotine flooding my brain. But I don’t care. I run very fast because I desperately want to stand very still. I run to seek a void. The world around me is so very, very loud. It begs me to slow down, to sit down, to lie down. And the buzzing of the world is nothing compared to the noise inside my head. I’m an introspective person, and sometimes I think too much, about my job and about my life. I feed an army of pointless, bantering demons. But when I run, the world grows quiet. Demons are forgotten, Krakens are slain, and Blerches are silenced. THE END.

Among the women, a spontaneous cheer went up, which Liz was surprised to find herself joining, and this was when (she was on her fifth drink) she realized both that she was completely drunk--not just tipsy, not merely buzzed--and also that she was much happier than she'd been an hour or two before. She felt a retroactive remorse for all the Eligible contestants she'd deemed trashy and idiotic from the comfort of her living room; apparently, like teriyaki pizza and bee venom facials, getting wasted on a reality-TV show was not to be knocked until tried.

I glance around the set—everyone is buzzing like worker bees getting ready for the shot. Cordelia’s getting primped and powdered by a makeup girl, Vanessa is speaking with a few of the cameramen, and the convertible I’m supposed to drive is just sitting there . . . all by its lonesome. And look at that—someone left the keys in the ignition. Stealthily, I sidle up to Sarah. “Have you ever driven in a convertible?” She looks up sharply, like she didn’t see me approach. “Of course I have.” My hands slide into my pockets and I lean back on my heels. “Have you ever been in a convertible driven by a prince?” Her eyes are lighter in the sun, with a hint of gold. They crinkle as she smiles. “No.” I nod. “Perfect. We do this in three.” Now she looks nervous. “Do what?” I spot James across the way, eyes scanning the crowd—far enough away that he’ll never get over here in time. “Three . . .” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Two . . .” “Henry . . .” “One.” “I . . .” “Go, go, go!” “Go where?” she asks, loud enough to draw attention. So I wrap my arm around her waist, lift her off her feet, carry her to the car, and swing her up and into the passenger seat. Then, I jump into the driver’s side. “Shit!” James curses. But then the engine is roaring to life. I back out, knocking over a food service table, and the tires screech as I turn around and drive across the grounds . . . toward the woods. “The road is that way!” Sarah yells, the wind making her long, dark hair dance and swirl. “I know a shortcut. Buckle up.” We fly into the woods, sending a flurry of leaves in our wake. The car bounces and jostles, and I feel Sarah’s hand wrapped around my arm—holding on. It feels good. “Duck.” “What?” I push her head down and crouch at the same time, to avoid getting whipped in the face by the low-branch of a pine tree. After we’re past it, Sarah sits up, owl-eyed, and looks back at the branch and then at me. I smirk. “If you wanted me to push your head down, love, you could’ve just said so.” “You’re insane!” I hit the gas hard, swerving around a stump. “What? You’re the only one who gets to make dirty jokes?” We have a sharp turn coming up ahead. I lay my arm across Sarah’s middle. “Hold on.

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year and the promise that soon the sun will be back again. But winter is not merely a trial to be got through while we wait for warmer times. You must embrace the cold days and long dark nights and learn to find the joy in them, for there is much joy to be found. Hunker down and revel in the warmth of soft blankets when the weather is howling outside. Make the time to take time, not just for others but for yourselves. Read books, light candles, take long baths, watch the flames flickering in the fireplace or the rain dribbling down the windowpanes. Open your eyes to the beauty in the winter landscape and count your blessings every single day. Slow down. There will be time enough for buzzing around with the bees when the sun comes back. For now, let the moments stretch long and lazy. Recuperate, rejuvenate, reflect, and let winter soothe you. Let this winter solstice be the first of many times this winter that you come together to give thanks and appreciate the people in your life. Gratitude is everything. It is infinite, and even in death I know that the warmth of my gratitude for all of you lives on in the spirit of this season." -Augustus

The article had included an interview with a state trooper who theorized that many of these so-called “foo crashes” resulted from insects in the car. Wasps, a bee, possibly even a spider or moth. The driver gets panicky, tries to swat it or unroll a window to let it out. Possibly the insect stings him. Maybe the driver just loses control. Either way it’s bang!… all over. And the insect, usually completely unharmed, would buzz merrily out of the smoking wreck, looking for greener pastures. The trooper had been in favor of having pathologists look for insect venom while autopsying such victims, Jack recalled.

before he went back to helping the boy. Missing from the Warrior tent were Kalona and Aurox. For obvious reasons, Thanatos had decided the Tulsa community wasn’t ready to meet either of them. I agreed with her. I wasn’t ready for … I mentally shook myself. No, I wasn’t going to think about the Aurox/Heath situation now. Instead I turned my attention to the second of the big tents. Lenobia was there, keeping a sharp eye on the people who clustered like buzzing bees around Mujaji and the big Percheron mare, Bonnie. Travis was with her. Travis was always with her, which made my heart feel good. It was awesome to see Lenobia in love. The Horse Mistress was like a bright, shining beacon of joy, and with all the Darkness I’d seen lately, that was rain in my desert. “Oh, for shit’s sake, where did I put my wine? Has anyone seen my Queenies cup? As the bumpkin reminded me, my parents are here somewhere, and I’m going to need fortification by the time they circle around and find me.” Aphrodite was muttering and pawing through the boxes of unsold cookies, searching for the big purple plastic cup I’d seen her drinking from earlier. “You have wine in that Queenies to go cup?” Stevie Rae was shaking her head at Aphrodite. “And you’ve been drinkin’ it through a straw?” Shaunee joined Stevie Rae in a head shake. “Isn’t that nasty?” “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Aphrodite quipped. “There are too many nuns lurking around to drink openly without hearing a boring lecture.” Aphrodite cut her eyes to the right of us where Street Cats had set up a half-moon display of cages filled with adoptable cats and bins of catnip-filled toys for sale. The Street Cats had their own miniature version of the silver and white tents, and I could see Damien sitting inside busily handling the cash register, but except for him, running every aspect of the feline area were the habit-wearing Benedictine nuns who had made Street Cats their own. One of the nuns looked my way and I waved and grinned at the Abbess. Sister Mary Angela waved back before returning to the conversation she was having with a family who were obviously falling in love with a cute white cat that looked like a giant cottonball. “Aphrodite, the nuns are cool,” I reminded her. “And they look too busy to pay any attention to you,” Stevie Rae said. “Imagine that—you may not be the center of everyone’s attention,” Shaylin said with mock surprise. Stevie Rae covered her giggle with a cough. Before Aphrodite could say something hateful, Grandma limped up to us. Other than the limp and being pale, Grandma looked healthy and happy. It had only been a little over a week since Neferet had kidnapped and tried to kill her, but she’d recovered with amazing quickness. Thanatos had told us that was because she was in unusually good shape for a woman of her age. I knew it was because of something else—something we both shared—a special bond with a goddess who believed in giving her children free choice, along with gifting them with special abilities. Grandma was beloved of the Great Mother,

For there is such a little time that your youth will last-- such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. After a time the bee flew away.

Nevertheless they come up with their own history of creation, the Dreaming. The first man was Ber-rook-boorn. He was made by Baiame, the uncreated, who was the beginning of everything, and who loved and took care of all living things. In other words, a good man, this Baiame. Friends called him the Great Fatherly Spirit. After Baiame established Ber-rook-boorn and his wife in a good place, he left his mark on a sacred tree—yarran—nearby, which was the home of a swarm of bees. “ ‘You can take food from anywhere you want, in the whole of this country that I have given you, but this is my tree,’ he warned the two people. ‘If you try to take food from there, much evil will befall you and those who come after you.’ Something like that. At any rate, one day Ber-rook-boorn’s wife was collecting wood and she came to the yarran tree. At first she was frightened at the sight of the holy tree towering above her, but there was so much wood lying around that she did not follow her first impulse—which was to run away as fast as her legs could carry her. Besides, Baiame had not said anything about wood. While she was gathering the wood around the tree she heard a low buzzing sound above her head, and she gazed up at the swarm of bees. She also saw the honey running down the trunk. She had only tasted honey once before, but here there was enough for several meals. The sun glistened on the sweet, shiny drops, and in the end Ber-rook-boorn’s wife could not resist the temptation and she climbed up the tree. “At that moment a cold wind came from above and a sinister figure with enormous black wings enveloped her. It was Narahdarn the bat, whom Baiame had entrusted with guarding the holy tree. The woman fell to the ground and ran back to her cave where she hid. But it was too late, she had released death into the world, symbolized by the bat Narahdarn, and all of the Ber-rook-boorn descendants would be exposed to its curse. The yarran tree cried bitter tears over the tragedy that had taken place. The tears ran down the trunk and thickened, and that is why you can find red rubber on the bark of the tree nowadays.” Andrew puffed happily on his cigar.

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

As she relaxed, she started to notice something happening to the ingredients beneath her fingers. As she touched them, poking and prodding, kneading and caressing, the sensations she used to feel when she cooked started to return. She could feel the icy gurgle of the salt water against weather-barren black rock as she tossed a handful of local mussels into a pot of butter and white wine. She chopped a foraged mushroom and inhaled the damp, loamy soil of the forest spicy with ferns and dripping with cool humidity. She grinned, buoyed by a wave of relief. At least for tonight, her Technicolor senses were in full swing. With a satisfied sigh of contentment, she spooned Star's honey over local goat cheese on rounds of sunflower seed crackers, hearing all around her the nectar-drunk buzzing of the bees. It felt like pure joy to handle the ingredients.

Unlike the rain-slicked streets of Oblakgrad, Dírorth was a stir of activity. The streets were lined with vendors selling greasy meat pies to passersby. The clogging crowd of Humans cramped together as they pushed past one another, rushing from one errand to the next. The shouting of a thousand voices melted together into a perpetual buzz, like a great swarm of bees hovering over the street. And yet a strange silence hung over the city. It filled in the background, inhabiting dark corners where the din of the crowd could not squelch it. It had a strange omnipresence, like something that you are subconsciously aware of, but do not consciously see with your eyes. It was a silence ignored, hidden by the façade of hectic traffic. You wouldn’t really notice it, not unless you were looking for it. Not unless you actually stopped to listen. If the city folk had stopped, frozen, if they had stilled themselves for a moment, the silence would have gaped wide open like a dark, hungry maw. But they ignored it. For the past century, they had covered that silence with the commotion of everyday life, refusing to let it control them. To define them. They did not hear it. They would not hear it. I myself did not hear it for years and years, not until the day that I actually stopped to listen. Can you hear it, now? Can you hear it in the words your reading, the words I say to you? Listen. Hear its empty resonance across the cobbles. Feel it in the dust beneath Notak’s boot, damp with last night’s rain. Smell it on the ragged clothes of the peasants, hidden in the folds of dirty fabric. See it in their eyes, latent beneath the gloss of the everyday. Taste it in the clamor of the streets, clamor born out of a unconscious urge to fill the quiet with something, anything to drive it away, anything to stave off the silence that reeked with defeat. It was the echo of a hundred years of slavery. It was the song of a people, waiting for God.

Neither do I express well nor do I know how to write perfectly charming like writers do yet here I sit every night under the stars hoping one to break away so I could wish for the missing peace of my puzzle of life .. * Selfish isn't it wishing something to break so we can join ourselves  maybe thats the law of nature. One always has to give up for something to live. Tree dies  leaving the seed for a new bud behind.  Crazy! The sacrifice for one becomes the breath for the other one without even  him realizing what suffering something went through for its precious life * It gets cold fast once you decide to swim deep into your thoughts . Every thing from a star to even the buzzing of bees tell you a story about what your existence might be for but the city's lights and sound never let you realize how small yet how fascinating your existence is . We tend to forget the meaning of life even after preaching the same for others ourselves. . It feels good and at peace with nobody to bother you anymore . You can think and imagine stuff that might never be but this wonderful brain imagines  it . If not forever Atleast for sometime   you can feel the feeling you forever lust for.  Sure the usual disturbances try to lure my mind away from things but I'm used to it now . The gloominess  inside doesn't let them affect inside anymore. * The sky gets dark it really does . Maybe like the night sky's supposed to be so are my thoughts with a beating heart to support them and keep the flame of fight lit like the moon lights up the sky even if that means reflecting the harsh rays of sun. * The time flies and so do the body shivers for warmth but I feel like staying. Sure the exposed sky gives peace but it comes at a cost so I try to bargain with  it every night. She's a good at negotiating though only gives me some hours before she signal that time's over. * Hesitantly I move my numb body using the last remaining gas in  the dying  shell known as body. How much i try it won't let me stay so here I leave heartbroken once again like every other night.

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts hissed and spat on my scalp. My bride’s breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged. There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified? Be terrified. It’s you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone. I glanced at a buzzing bee, a dull grey pebble fell to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down. I looked at a ginger cat, a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit. I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain. And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn’t I beautiful? Wasn’t I fragrant and young? Look at me now. - Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy -

So at last Ilar Sant came to this wood, which people now call St. Hilary's wood because they have forgotten all about Ilar. And he was weary with his wandering, and the day was very hot; so he stayed by this well and began to drink. And there on that great stone he saw the shining fish, and so he rested, and built an altar and a church of willow boughs, and offered the sacrifice not only for the quick and the dead, but for all the wild beasts of the woods and the streams. "And when this blessed Ilar rang his holy bell and began to offer, there came not only the Prince and his servants, but all the creatures of the wood. There, under the hazel boughs, you might see the hare, which flies so swiftly from men, come gently and fall down, weeping greatly on account of the Passion of the Son of Mary. And, beside the hare, the weasel and the pole-cat would lament grievously in the manner of penitent sinners; and wolves and lambs together adored the saint's hierurgy; and men have beheld tears streaming from the eyes of venomous serpents when Ilar Agios uttered 'Curiluson' with a loud voice—since the serpent is not ignorant that by its wickedness sorrow came to the whole world. And when, in the time of the holy ministry, it is necessary that frequent Alleluyas should be chanted and vociferated, the saint wondered what should be done, for as yet none in that place was skilled in the art of song. Then was a great miracle, since from all the boughs of the wood, from every bush and from every green tree, there resounded Alleluyas in enchanting and prolonged harmony; never did the Bishop of Rome listen to so sweet a singing in his church as was heard in this wood. For the nightingale and thrush and blackbird and blackcap, and all their companions, are gathered together and sing praises to the Lord, chanting distinct notes and yet concluding in a melody of most ravishing sweetness; such was the mass of the Fisherman. Nor was this all, for one day as the saint prayed beside the well he became aware that a bee circled round and round his head, uttering loud buzzing sounds, but not endeavouring to sting him. To be short; the bee went before Ilar, and led him to a hollow tree not far off, and straightway a swarm of bees issued forth, leaving a vast store of wax behind them. This was their oblation to the Most High, for from their wax Ilar Sant made goodly candles to burn at the Offering; and from that time the bee is holy, because his wax makes light to shine upon the Gifts.

The soldiers had been entrenched in their positions for several weeks but there was little, if any fighting, except for the dozen rounds they ritually exchanged every day. The weather was extremely pleasant. The air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and nature seem to be following its course, quite unmindful of the soldiers hiding behind rocks and camouflaged by mountain shrubbery. The birds sang as they always had and the flowers were in bloom. Bees buzzed about lazily. Only when a shot rang out, the birds got startled and took flight, as if a musician had struck a jarring note on his instrument. It was almost the end of September, neither hot nor cold. It seemed as if summer and winter had made their peace. In the blue skies, cotton clouds floated all day like barges on a lake. The soldiers seemed to be getting tired of this indecisive war where nothing much ever happened. Their positions were quite impregnable. The two hills on which they were placed faced each other and were about the same height, so no one side had an advantage. Down below in the valley, a stream zigzagged furiously on its stony bed like a snake. The air force was not involved in the combat and neither of the adversaries had heavy guns or mortars. At night, they would light huge fires and hear each other's voices echoing through the hills. From The Dog of Titwal, a short story.

A school bus is many things. A school bus is a substitute for a limousine. More class. A school bus is a classroom with a substitute teacher. A school bus is the students' version of a teachers' lounge. A school bus is the principal's desk. A school bus is the nurse's cot. A school bus is an office with all the phones ringing. A school bus is a command center. A school bus is a pillow fort that rolls. A school bus is a tank reshaped- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a science lab- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a safe zone. A school bus is a war zone. A school bus is a concert hall. A school bus is a food court. A school bus is a court of law, all judges, all jury. A school bus is a magic show full of disappearing acts. Saw someone in half. Pick a card, any card. Pass it on to the person next to you. He like you. She like you. K-i-s-s-i . . . s-s-i-p-p-i is only funny on a school bus. A school bus is a stage. A school bus is a stage play. A school bus is a spelling bee. A speaking bee. A get your hand out of my face bee. A your breath smell like sour turnips bee. A you don't even know what a turnip bee is. A maybe not, but I know what a turn up is and your breath smell all the way turnt up bee. A school bus is a bumblebee, buzzing around with a bunch of stingers on the inside of it. Windows for wings that flutter up and down like the windows inside Chinese restaurants and post offices in neighborhoods where school bus is a book of stamps. Passing mail through windows. Notes in the form of candy wrappers telling the street something sweet came by. Notes in the form of sneaky middle fingers. Notes in the form of fingers pointing at the world zooming by. A school bus is a paintbrush painting the world a blurry brushstroke. A school bus is also wet paint. Good for adding an extra coat, but it will dirty you if you lean against it, if you get too comfortable. A school bus is a reclining chair. In the kitchen. Nothing cool about it but makes perfect sense. A school bus is a dirty fridge. A school bus is cheese. A school bus is a ketchup packet with a tiny hole in it. Left on the seat. A plastic fork-knife-spoon. A paper tube around a straw. That straw will puncture the lid on things, make the world drink something with some fizz and fight. Something delightful and uncomfortable. Something that will stain. And cause gas. A school bus is a fast food joint with extra value and no food. Order taken. Take a number. Send a text to the person sitting next to you. There is so much trouble to get into. Have you ever thought about opening the back door? My mother not home till five thirty. I can't. I got dance practice at four. A school bus is a talent show. I got dance practice right now. On this bus. A school bus is a microphone. A beat machine. A recording booth. A school bus is a horn section. A rhythm section. An orchestra pit. A balcony to shot paper ball three-pointers from. A school bus is a basketball court. A football stadium. A soccer field. Sometimes a boxing ring. A school bus is a movie set. Actors, directors, producers, script. Scenes. Settings. Motivations. Action! Cut. Your fake tears look real. These are real tears. But I thought we were making a comedy. A school bus is a misunderstanding. A school bus is a masterpiece that everyone pretends to understand. A school bus is the mountain range behind Mona Lisa. The Sphinx's nose. An unknown wonder of the world. An unknown wonder to Canton Post, who heard bus riders talk about their journeys to and from school. But to Canton, a school bus is also a cannonball. A thing that almost destroyed him. Almost made him motherless.

Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet. It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book. And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves, she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

Silence. I’m sure that many hearing people, especially those who don’t know the deaf, imagine our lives are filled with silence. That’s not true. If my mind and heart are full of energy and fun, and I’m looking ahead with excitement, I don’t feel silent at all. I buzz like a bee in good times. Only in bad times, when I am numb and full of sadness, does everything turn silent. Like our house with just Mama and me in it.

Ode to Bees Multitude of bees! in and out of the crimson, the blue, the yellow, of the softest softness in the world; you tumble headlong into a corolla to conduct your business, and emerge wearing a golden suit and quantities of yellow boots. The waist, perfect, the abdomen striped with dark bars, the tiny, ever-busy head, the wings, newly made of water; you enter every sweet-scented window, open silken doors, penetrate the bridal chamber of the most fragrant love, discover a drop of diamond dew, and from every house you visit you remove honey, mysterious, rich and heavy honey, thick aroma, liquid, guttering light, until you return to your communal palace and on its gothic parapets deposit the product of flower and flight, the seraphic and secret nuptial sun! Multitude of bees! Sacred elevation of unity, seething schoolhouse. Buzzing, noisy workers process the nectar, swiftly exchanging drops of ambrosia; it is summer siesta in the green solitudes of Osorno. High above, the sun casts its spears into the snow, volcanoes glisten, land stretches endless as the sea, space is blue, but something trembles, it is the fiery, heart of summer, the honeyed heart multiplied, the buzzing bee, the crackling honeycomb of flight and gold! Bees, purest laborers, ogival workers fine, flashing proletariat, perfect, daring militia that in combat attack with suicidal sting; buzz, buzz above the earth's endowments, family of gold, multitude of the wind, shake the fire from the flowers, thirst from the stamens, the sharp, aromatic thread that stitches together the days, and propagate honey, passing over humid continents, the most distant islands of the western sky. Yes: let the wax erect green statues, let honey spill in infinite tongues, let the ocean be a beehive, the earth tower and tunic of flowers, and the world a waterfall, a comet's tail, a never-ending wealth of honeycombs! Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Illustrated edition, May 1, 1994)

Bathe deeply in that ocean of sound Vibrating within you, now as always, Resonating softly, Permeating the space of the heart. The ear that is tuned by rapt listening Learns to hear the song of creation. First like a hand bell, Then subtler, like a flute, Subtler still as a stringed instrument, Eventually as the buzz of a bee. Entering this current of sound, The Listening One Forgets the external world, becomes Absorbed into internal sound, Then absorbed in vastness, Like the song of the stars as they shine.

You think bees are just buzzing around innocently making you delicious honey and not expecting a payback sometime? One day their true end game will be revealed.

All of her people, all her tasks, buzzed in her head like angry bees.

I told myself to concentrate on my needle, in, out, in, out. But the bees buzzed around the orange blossoms, the constant drone lulling me, and I vaguely reminded myself to ask Chelo later if she thought the bees might be sipping a bit of some lost soul along with the nectar.

[In marriage you] go through stages, like acts in a play. Act One, you fall in love, and the birds twitter and the bees go buzz, and you'll never love somebody else as long as you both shall live, amen. Act Two, enter the baby carriage, and all of a sudden he catches sight of a pair of firm young tits and figures life is short. Act Three...you realize there's no point letting the husbands have all the fun. [Vivian Schuyler]

I could be King and you could be Queen. And we could buzz louder than bees. Love wilder than the woods. We could just be. We're heroes today. Just today.

What's wrong hub-bee?” Mom asked with a smirk.  Dad rolled his eyes. “No more please!”  “What?” Mom said, “can’t you tell that I’ve POLLEN in love with you?”  Dad covered his ears, and the kids laughed.  Mom continued. “Because you’re my honey.”  Dad cringed again. “Dad,” Jack said, “if you don’t like her jokes tell her to buzz off.”  Kate laughed. “Yeah, maybe you guys aren't in the... HONEY-moon phase anymore.”  “Don’t be a bay-bee,” Mom said to Dad, “bee positive!”  “AAAH!” Dad yelled. “Stop, stop!”  “What’s wrong?” Mom asked, “Do these jokes sting?”  Jack and Kate cracked up and even Mom started laughing her head off while Dad stood there with his hands over his ears saying, “Lalala! I can’t hear you!

I encourage you to sit by some flowers and listen to the bees buzzing. The frequency, vibrations, and energy of all life are in their sound.

Nono kept his bees until 1966, the year of my birth...that Spring he gave all his hives into the care of a beekeeper neighbor, whose name we no longer remember. This was near the Draznica station, on the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twenty-seven years later, in a new war, an entire village would be killed in this exact place. The living descendants of Nono's bees would buzz around the open eyes and nostrils of people who would no longer shoo them away. An orchard grew just behind (his) apiary. Apples and the odd short, humble pear, up to the edge of the property. Every little piece of his land...borrowed from his son-in-law and daughter, was attended to, and its purpose and significance was clear to everyone - almost an entire human age would need to pass in order for the earth to forget him completely, to wipe from its surface his choices of what was to grow, and where.

the ravager charged toward the river, desperate to get away from the cloud of buzzing, stinging bees that now filled the village. With a huge splash, it jumped into the water. It floated away down the stream, and was carried out of sight.

Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

But your gentle wing is weary, yet you soar, in air you streak. . . Tell me, tell me, buzzing bee what so early do you seek? If it’s honey you desire fold your wings, strive no more. I will show you one sure realm where you’ll find enough to store. Don’t you know my love, my Nici, Nici with the lovely eyes? On her lips such flavor rests it’s of sweetness a great prize.

The bee flew past, buzzing loudly. They could feel the wind from its wings as it zoomed into the bee nest. Kate furrowed her brow. “I don’t know, they seem to ignore us like regular bees would.”  “Yeah,” Jack said, “they are bee-having normally.”  Kate giggled. “Bee-hiving normally.”  “But they DO have red eyes,” Mom said, “maybe they’ve been bee-witched!”  Dad groaned at Mom. “You too?” “What's wrong hub-bee?” Mom asked with a smirk.  Dad rolled his eyes. “No more please!”  “What?” Mom said, “can’t you tell that I’ve POLLEN in love with you?”  Dad covered his ears, and the kids laughed.  Mom continued. “Because you’re my honey.”  Dad cringed again. “Dad,” Jack said, “if you don’t like her jokes tell her to buzz off.”  Kate laughed. “Yeah, maybe you guys aren't in the... HONEY-moon phase anymore.”  “Don’t be a bay-bee,” Mom said to Dad, “bee positive!”  “AAAH!” Dad yelled. “Stop, stop!”  “What’s wrong?” Mom asked, “Do these jokes sting?”  Jack and Kate cracked up and even Mom started laughing her head off while Dad stood there with his hands over his ears saying, “Lalala! I can’t hear you!” When he noticed they had all stopped talking, he took his hands down. “Finally. You guys were bee-ing annoying.” They had a final laugh, then walked closer to the bee nest, to get a better look. Mom tapped Dad on the shoulder. “Do you like my hair today?”  Dad looked confused for a moment. “Uh... yes? It's very nice. You always look nice.”  Mom smiled at him. “Thank you dear, I just wanted to know if I needed to honeycomb it.

nothing reminds me of you you are all i think about. you infest my mind like a swarm of bees buzzing too loudly, i can’t think clearly.

Georgia held the jar up to the light, gazing at the dark golden color of the honey, remembering the buzzing of the bees, the fragrance of the apple orchard laced with the briny scent of the sea. On impulse, she twisted the lid off the jar and swirled her finger through the honey. She licked it clean. She could just catch a hint of lavender in the creamy goodness. She scooped up another little dollop. Strange. Somehow, the honey tasted like love, like the answer to a question, like coming home.

Oh, the inimical echo of this world of men and women alone! Where be the feet of goats? The wings of butterflies? The buzz of bees? The raging fire of bulls? The dolphin’s foamy music and the whale’s divided temperance? The arachnid’s stalking! Nay; they are all but shadows of wisps, but reflections inside the memories of trees!

Shush, Jer. You’re like an annoying buzzing bee that won’t go away.” “Jeez, thanks.” “Anytime, we’re bros.

Whoever decided that a phone should buzz like an angry bee at the crack of dawn must’ve hated humanity.

Little bee.” He looks me over, contemplating whether to respond or not, and I’m surprised when he does. “Because you’re this dainty little thing, buzzing along with the role you’ve been given in life. But the moment someone makes you scared, you’ll try your best to sting them. Only, you’ll be dead without your little stinger, and the person who you stung will carry on living. Not even a scar to remember you by.

And Joey loved the sound of the water flowing in the stream. He liked to listen to the water gurgle over the stones and the loud splash of the waterfall. He enjoyed lying on his back and looking up at the sky through the leaves on the trees. It was so nice to lie in the cool shade on a hot summer’s day listening to the bees buzzing and the birds singing. It was beautiful.

Thus, bees buzz and hummingbirds hum, squids and chameleons change color, amoebas engulf prey, crows solve problems, and humans build rockets to the stars, only because oxidation releases metabolic energy in quantities much greater than are needed for merely sustaining the basic metabolism of the cell. Proton Pumping THE MECHANISM by which cells use cellular respiration to manufacture ATP is not only one of the wonders of cell biology, but also one of the most unexpected and important discoveries of twentieth-century science.

A DEVOTEE: “Suppose a man has obtained the Knowledge of Brahman in samādhi. Doesn’t he speak any more?” MASTER: “Śankarāchārya2 retained the ‘ego of Knowledge’ in order to teach others. After the vision of Brahman a man becomes silent. He reasons about It as long as he has not realized It. If you heat butter in a pan on the stove, it makes a sizzling sound as long as the water it contains has not dried up. But when no trace of water is left the clarified butter makes no sound. If you put an uncooked cake of flour in that butter it sizzles again. But after the cake is cooked all sound stops. Just so, a man established in samādhi comes down to the relative plane of consciousness in order to teach others, and then he talks about God. “The bee buzzes as long as it is not sitting on a flower. It becomes silent when it begins to sip the honey. But sometimes, intoxicated with the honey, it buzzes again. “An empty pitcher makes a gurgling sound when it is dipped in water. When it fills up it becomes silent. (All laugh.) But if the water is poured

Home, the susurration of chestnut leaves said. Home, the bees buzzed. Home, a raven called from its perch on the ridge of the roof. Home, my heart echoed. I belonged to this place where I’d never been, and a sense of rightness settled over me as Ravenswood exerted its pull, like the moon on the tides.

Push-button motorbike horns, once aroused into action, were like a gaggle of intermittently disgruntled geese caught a in the middle of a very large swarm of fat and lumbering bees: a rumbling engine noise. The bees lurch, barge, and buzz. The geese grumble, natter, and quack. Every day the geese and the bees wake up in the same mood and in the same place.

You can’t mean to marry her!” Roslyn’s shrill voice rose. “Do you forget how she stole from you? That she tried to ruin your company? If you need any reminders, just look at the new hotels going up in Paris and Rome. Your hotels, Chrysander. Only they’re going up under your competitor’s name.” A haze blew through Marley’s mind. Red hot. Like a swarm of angry bees, tidbits of information began buzzing in her head. And suddenly it was as if a dam broke. The locked door in her mind that she’d tried so hard to budge simply opened, and the past came roaring through with vicious velocity. She swayed and gripped the door frame tighter. Nausea boiled in her stomach as each and every moment flashed like a movie in fast-forward. Chrysander’s angry accusation of thievery. His ordering her from their apartment, his life. Her abduction and the months she’d spent in hopeless fear, waiting for Chrysander to answer the ransom demands. Demands he’d ignored. Oh God, she was going to be sick. He’d left her. Discarded her like a piece of rubbish. The half million dollars, a paltry sum to a man of Chrysander’s means, was an amount he’d been unwilling to part with to ensure her return. Everything had been a lie. He’d lied to her nonstop since she’d awoken in the hospital. He didn’t love her or want her. He despised her. She hadn’t been worth half a million dollars to him. Pain splintered through her chest as she shattered. As everything she’d known as true suddenly turned black. Her heart withered and cracked, falling in pieces around her. He hadn’t tried to save her. The tortured cry that ripped from her mouth echoed through the room. She clamped a hand over her lips, but it was too late. Everyone looked her way. Theron flinched, and an odd discomfort settled over Piers’s face. She met Chrysander’s gaze, and she could see the truth in his eyes as he realized that she remembered.

Emotions buzz through our beings like busy bees, giving us the gift of living vividly.

Oh, God—” “Don’t move.” Rohan’s voice was astonishingly calm. “Don’t swat at them.” She had never known such primal fear, welling up from beneath her skin, leaking through every pore. No part of her body seemed to be under her control. The air was boiling with them, bees and more bees. It was not going to be a pleasant way to die. Closing her eyes tightly, Amelia willed herself to be still, when every muscle strained and screamed for action. Insects moved in sinuous patterns around her, tiny bodies touching her sleeves, hands, shoulders. “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,” she heard Rohan say. Amelia highly doubted that. “These are not f-frightened bees.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “These are f-furious bees.” “They do seem a bit annoyed,” Rohan conceded, approaching her slowly. “It could be the dress you’re wearing—they tend not to like dark colors.” A short pause. “Or it could be the fact that you just ripped down half their hive.” “If you h-have the nerve to be amused by this—” She broke off and covered her face with her hands, trembling all over. His soothing voice undercut the buzzing around them. “Be still. Everything’s fine. I’m right here with you.” “Take me away,” she whispered desperately. Her heart was pounding too hard, making her bones shake, driving every coherent thought from her head. She felt him brush a few inquisitive insects from her hair and back. His arms went around her, his shoulder sturdy beneath her cheek. “I will, sweetheart. Put your arms around my neck.” She groped for him blindly, feeling sick and weak and disoriented. The flat muscles at the back of his neck shifted as he bent toward her, gathering her up as easily as if she were a child. “There,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.

Visitors to the lower stretches of the Pascagoula River may notice something strange: an eerie, low humming sound, beckoning from the dark waters. The unusual sound, sometimes described as similar to that of a swarm of bees, is said locally to be the last haunting refrain of the vanished Pascagoula Indians, who marched into the river to drown, singing as they went, rather than fight or be enslaved by the invading Biloxi Indians. In tribute to the tragic legend and the strange echoes of this faded past, locals often refer to the buzzing waters as the Singing River.

Jimmy decided to get drunk—not just drunk enough to enjoy life (here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back), not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold and sticky all over his face again, puke being the concretization of Jimmy's disgust with Jimmy whose eyes would be burning and throat burning and stomach squirming like a guilty squid and every muscle aching, and the dry heaves inside him just like heartbeats, just like yesterday;—no, he wanted to be drunk enough to scientifically establish the existence of the whores that he could see all around him. (Jimmy had always liked whores.) So he started drinking.

Have you had much luck tonight?” she asked. His gaze slipped to the neat stacks of coins in front of her. “No’ as much as ye, my lady.” She let her own stare trail across her piles of winnings. Shame sizzled against her cheeks.,,, “Perhaps I’m lucky tonight myself,” he said. The silky undertone in his voice crept up her back like the skilled swipe of a musician’s fingers strumming a harp. “What do you mean?” Of course she knew what he meant, but the glint of flirtation in his eye begged her to prompt him for the compliment. A golden dollop of honey dribbled to lure the bee. And she buzzed ever closer. He pulled his freshly dealt cards toward him. “Perhaps I’m lucky tonight because I’ve met ye.

From the roars of beasts springs forth praise The buzz of the insects and bees serenades praise The fish inhales and exhales praise And everything that breathes praise Him

Paulo plugged in the machine, which looked like the mutant offspring of a vacuum cleaner and a toaster oven, and showed them how to place wood chips in the bottom. Then he lit the wood chips with a long match and aimed the metal contraption at the opening of the hive. Puffs of smoke wafted around the hive and then blew straight in. Almost immediately the bees, which had been flying haphazardly around the room, raced back to the hive, and the buzzing inside grew louder and louder.

Like a bee swarm, the reporters that had buzzed off from Olivia’s house had resettled along the front of the police station. Several recognized Olivia and poked their

But there have been other press conferences that last less time than it takes to boil an egg. No doubt you will have heard about the famous ‘Hairdryer’, the shouting, his ferocity when the bee in his bonnet starts to buzz out of control. It’s all true. He’s every bit as frightening as is made out. One prick of his temper glands and he will be up, leaning forward, jutting out his forehead, indiscriminately machine-gunning swearwords at someone who has asked or written something he doesn’t like. It’s the eyes. Those rheumy, pale-green eyes. They stare you down. Your palms begin to sweat. You mouth feels dry, as if you have just swallowed a tablespoon of sawdust. You start to feel pathetically weak. The outburst might last only a few seconds but it always feels so much longer. And you realise you are half-bowing, staring at your feet. It’s a degrading experience.

Who lived here?” Steven asked, slowing his pace now that they’d reached level ground. Emma reached back to be sure her braid wasn’t coming undone. “Just some homesteaders. I don’t know what their names were.” Steven released her hand and gave the remains of the house a thorough assessment, as though it might be important to remember what he saw. “It must have been nice, living out here—just a man and his wife, and maybe a couple of kids.” “It must have been lonely,” Emma countered. “Besides, you don’t know what this lake is like in winter—it freezes solid in some places. These people might easily have been marooned here for weeks at a time.” She shivered, even though there were bees buzzing in the warm May air. “I imagine they found things to do,” Steven said quietly. He held out a hand to Emma, and she went to him, just as she always did. Emma flushed as she lowered her eyes, unable to help picturing herself and Steven in such a situation. “I imagine,” she conceded. Just

ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although

Hugh just dropped off the cheese selection for the week. I thought you'd like to sample?" I perked up immediately. Sampling cheese sounded fun. I was starving. The Hobnobs hadn't been particularly filling. The light, airy dining room was a beehive of activity. Four servers buzzed around, readying tables, wrapping silverware. Outside someone was watering the ornamental cabbages. I sat at a table with Chandice and tasted a half dozen local cheeses. A sharp English cheddar with a bite that lingered just at the hint of your jaw, a creamy goat cheese lavished with a sweet onion chutney. Stuffing the last of a very toothsome local blue cheese into my mouth, I looked around at the happy bustle with satisfaction. This is what I had always dreamed of, this bright hive of positive energy.

The buzzing beneath my feet intensified as I neared the small pool of water. This had to be the gazing pool I'd heard about. Sheltered by tall, skinny evergreens and shrubs that held heavy clusters of small, delicate white flowers, it was shaded by the canopy of an old live oak tree that had moss growing at the base of its trunk. Curiosity drew me in. Faint ripples pulsed along the water's surface as the small pool burbled gently, peacefully, as if I relieved to be unburdened of its long-held secret about Bee. I studied the burbling, wondering what caused it, because it didn't appear that anyone had placed a running hose beneath its surface. There was no equipment at all. Just clear water. A knee-high mossy stone wall enclosed the pool, and ferns grew along its foundation, nestled snugly, their fronds rustling in the warm breeze. Suddenly I felt the urge to sit and stare into the water, and I absently smiled, thinking the gazing pool had been appropriately named.

The bee buzzed past again, flying in spirals toward the water. I followed it with my gaze, hoping it didn't plunge into the pool, as I didn't think bees could swim. It turned out I needn't have worried, as its fuzzy yellow body simply skimmed the water's surface. As I stared at the bee, it seemed to me its yellow bands began to glow brightly.

and when she walks into the room, everybody turns: some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona. We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy,

Why'd your mother choose the name Glory? Is there meaning behind it?" "I thought she had chosen it because morning glories represent mortal life, but Mama told me it was because there had been a golden light around me when I came back to Georgia. Said it looked like a full-body halo. Till the day she died, she said that light was because when Bee had gone to glory, glory had come to me." It was impossible not to remember that the first time I saw Glory, I'd thought she glowed with light as well, as if her innate goodness shined for all to see. "But I don't think it's some kind of halo at all," she said, "even though such a big piece of me died that night in this garden." "What do you think it is?" She glanced at a bee skimming the water of the gazing pool. "It's always reminded me of honey. Especially since I feel like the bees are looking out for me. I've felt their buzzing underfoot since that horrible night. It never went away. I like to think that the glow---and the buzzing---are their reminders that I'm safe now.

The bees of my melancholy, which had rarely troubled me since we escaped that foul man Bellingham at Valley Forge, were buzzing inside my brainpan, fast overcoming my customary caution.

Rick contacted me about the session, but he didn't know who in hell was coming in. I said, "Who you got?" He said, "Aretha Franklin." I said, "Boy, you better get your damn shoes on. You getting someone who can sing." Even the Memphis guys didn't really know who in the hell she was. I said, "Man, this woman gonna knock you out." They're all going, "Big deal!" When she come in there and sit down at the piano and hit that first chord, everybody was just like little bees just buzzing around the queen. You could tell by the way she hit the piano the gig was up. It was, "Let's get down to serious business." That first chord she hit was nothing we'd been demoing, and nothing none of them cats in Memphis had been, either. We'd just been dumb-dumb playing, but this was the real thing. That's the prettiest session picture I can ever remember. If I'd had a camera, I'd have a great film of that session, because I can still see it in my mind's eye, just how it was - Spooner on the organ, Moman playing guitar, Aretha at the piano - it was beautiful, better than any session I've ever seen, and I seen a bunch of 'em.' Spooner Oldham, the weedy keyboard player who is most known for never playing the same licks twice and who is ordinarily the most reticent of men, speaks in similar superlatives. 'I was hired to play keyboards. She was gonna stand up in front of the microphone and sing. She was showing us this song she had brought down there with her, she hit that magic chord when Wexler was going up the little steps to the control room, and I just stopped. I said, "Now, look, I'm not trying to cop out or nothing. I know I was hired to play piano, but I wish you'd let her play that thing, and I could get on organ and electric." And that's the way it was. It was a good, honest move, and one of the best things I ever done - and I didn't do nothing.

At last they came to a hill and abandoned their bikes at the bottom. As they crested the knoll, Helen felt as though they were creeping upon some great secret and on the other side they’d find a giant sleeping or a black X with three shovels beside it. What they found was magic by a different name. Planes buzzed on runways like bees in a jar, and when one took off, a roar filled the air. As it lifted away from the earth, a breeze swept over their hilltop, and it left Helen wondering if they had been touched by the magic or if it was truly only a breeze.

That’s the problem with secrets. They buzz around inside the keeper like a hive of bees. Before long, somebody pokes it and the secrets swarm out, vexed and ready to sting.

If you see someone engaged in reasoning even after he has realized God, you may liken him to a bee, which also buzzes a little even while sipping honey from a flower.

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.

She feels a tickling sensation against her hand, different from the silky touch of soil. Looking down, she sees the pink glimmer of a worm---and then another, and another. As she watches, spellbound, other insects emerge from the earth, glowing like jewels in the summer sun. The copper glint of a beetle's shell. The pale, segmented bodies of larvae. There is a buzzing in her ears, and she's not sure if it's from the roar of her pulse or the bees that have begun to circle nearby. They're getting closer. It's as if something---as if Kate---is drawing them. A beetle climbs her wrist, a worm brushes against the bare skin of her knee, a bee lands on her earlobe.

The flowers bloomed, the bees buzzed.

Busy bees make honey, but productive bees make a hive. Don't just buzz around; create something that lasts.

Mona rushed through the shower and selected her best dress, a slinky black wraparound number that she ordered on a whim, online. She piled her hair into a messy up do and lined her eyes in black liner with grey eye shadow for a smoky effect. Berry lip stick, dangly silver earrings and a spritz of perfume completed the look. Just as she was slipping on a pair of strappy heels, her cell phone buzzed. It was her Aunt Bee calling. “Darling! The BOGO sale is a great success. Alana says you almost brought the Frugalicious server down!” “I did!” “Blackberry ginger jam is a knock out!” “Well, it may have been knocked off too.” “Whatdya mean?” Aunt Bee asked. “Lacey MacInroy got hold of my recipes, and I understand she’s preparing my jam for the As You Slice It gala reception tonight.” “Why that little rat!” Aunt Bee said. “Are you going to the reception?” Mona asked. “No way! Alexander has never honored, not one of the Coupon Clipper’s requests for a sale. Are you going?” Aunt Bee asked. “Yup. On my way now. Wish me luck,” and as Mona hung up, she heard Aunt Bee squeak out, “Luck with what?” Mona admired her reflection in the mirror and declared herself ready for action. Grabbing her car keys and purse, she nearly stumbled, racing down the front steps. Driving into town, she felt a feeling she had not experienced in a long time, bravery. This new-found liberation from caring about what anyone thought about her was freeing. She felt like her old self once more, that girl she used to be the

do you think MM stands for?” I asked. “March Madness?” replied Michael, who never ties his shoes. “Marilyn Monroe?” said Ryan, who will eat anything, even stuff that isn’t food. “Mickey Mouse?” said Neil, who we call the nude kid even though he wears clothes. “My Mom?” said Alexia, this girl who rides a skateboard all the time. Everybody was buzzing, which was weird because we’re not bees.

Few honey bees buzzed above my head, pollinating on the last few flowers left untouched. But all the butterflies were in my stomach.

Genetics or brain chemistry, trauma or karma? It doesn’t really matter what it’s called—after all, no one really knows for sure what causes this affliction—except that it ends. Can I stop doing this? Am I even able? The bees trapped inside my body buzz and whir, needling my nerve endings with delicate stings.

Yeah,” Jack said, “they are bee-having normally.”  Kate giggled. “Bee-hiving normally.”  “But they DO have red eyes,” Mom said, “maybe they’ve been bee-witched!”  Dad groaned at Mom. “You too?” “What's wrong hub-bee?” Mom asked with a smirk.  Dad rolled his eyes. “No more please!”  “What?” Mom said, “can’t you tell that I’ve POLLEN in love with you?”  Dad covered his ears, and the kids laughed.  Mom continued. “Because you’re my honey.”  Dad cringed again. “Dad,” Jack said, “if you don’t like her jokes tell her to buzz off.”  Kate laughed. “Yeah, maybe you guys aren't in the... HONEY-moon phase anymore.”  “Don’t be a bay-bee,” Mom said to Dad, “bee positive!”  “AAAH!” Dad yelled. “Stop, stop!”  “What’s wrong?” Mom asked, “Do these jokes sting?”  Jack and Kate cracked up and even Mom started laughing her head off while Dad stood there with his hands over his ears saying, “Lalala! I can’t hear you!

months the sunshine would warm the sap in those trees into liquid gold. Like blood inside of veins, it would transform the corpses into living Madonnas, pregnant with tiny green buds, crowned in pink, adorned with leafy skirts, and perfumed with blossoms. The bees would buzz around them like groupies.

When you are taking care of bees, being able to protect yourself from their stings is crucial to working in comfort and with great efficiency. A beekeeper suit, often just called a bee suit, is the best way to protect your body from the bees from head to toe when you are working in the hives or collecting the honey.

We walked and talked amid the vines. The bees followed and buzzed the juicy offerings. I watched as they sipped, tonguing the vined fruit. We walked in the heat and scent and the Father talked of the natural world and hinted at books to be read and Music, and how the world reflected some larger potential. I struggled with his words. No one had ever spoken to me like that. His words seduced. Their easy flow thrummed and I could see things that day that I had never imagined. We walked and I noted the bees, how they fed and then staggered in ragged lines across the broad grape leaves. The Father said they were making themselves drunk on the older berries in which the juice had begun to ferment in the hot sun. They wobbled and stumbled like old men. He said the bees were drunk, but they fell to the ground and buzzed one last time and then lay still. He said they were drunk. They seemed dead . . .

Do you have a vibrator in your carry on?” Cole asks. “Um…no?” Stone answers unconvincingly. “Those are…emotional support bees.” “Emotional support bees?” Ev repeats with a smirk. “Ah, there it is.” The buzzing stops, but before he can re-zip his bag, Cole snags it and peeks inside. “It’s a butt plug.” He pulls the plug out of the bag and holds it up triumphantly. “You realize that’s been in my ass, right?” Stone says casually, and Cole’s expression morphs from teasing to horrified as he drops the plug. It thuds and then bounces when it hits the ground, a few passersby looking on with expressions ranging from amused to horrified. Dare stoops down to pick up the plug and stuffs it back into the bag. “Are you even allowed to take that in your carry-on?” Watson, Everett’s boyfriend, asks curiously. “Oh shit, I’m not sure. Should I put it in instead?” Stone asks. “Don’t worry, I Googled it. You’re allowed to have it in your carry-on,” Dare assures him. “I’m glad one of us is on top of things,” he says with relief. “Always,” Dare says with a meaningful smirk, and Stone lets out a surprised laugh.

More than seventy years ago, George Wald noted the vital importance of the additional energy that respiration provides for complex life using oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor. “It is difficult to overestimate the degree to which the invention of cellular respiration released the forces of living organisms,” he wrote in a well-known Scientific American article. “No organism that relies wholly on fermentation [glycolysis] has ever amounted to much.… Respiration used the material of organisms with such enormously greater efficiency as for the first time to leave something over.… To use an economic analogy, photosynthesis brought organisms to subsistence level; respiration provided them with capital. It is mainly this capital that they invested in the great enterprise of organic evolution.”24 Thus, bees buzz and hummingbirds hum, squids and chameleons change color, amoebas engulf prey, crows solve problems, and humans build rockets to the stars, only because oxidation releases metabolic energy in quantities much greater than are needed for merely sustaining the basic metabolism of the cell.

He can be more bumble bee than bear sometimes, though.” “What do you mean?” asked Meredith, confused. “Think about it: bumble bees work all day, bump into things left and right, they’re total klutzes, and they’re hard to understand, they just go buzz, buzz, buzz,” joked Scott.

If you have been close to bees and heard the disturbing noise they make when they buzz in their thousands — that’s today’s music for you.

You let my mother know what you’re about,” she said in Irish, just in case. “On purpose. My mother knows this. And you two are deep in your game, and I am one of those bees, sent by the queen bee to buzz from hive to hive to flower, not knowing what’s really going on.” “Well,” he said. “I’m surprised it took you so long.

I must start with the Bible, in which it is clearly stated that if an Ox kills a woman or a man, it should be stoned to death. Saint Bernard excommunicated a swarm of Bees, whose buzzing prevented him from working. Bees also had to answer for the death of a Man from the city of Worms in the year 846. The local parliament condemned them to death by suffocation. In 1394 in France some Pigs killed and ate a child. The Sow was sentenced to hang, but her six children were spared, taking their young age into consideration.

All sensory information is a massive, constantly changing puzzle for your brain to solve. The objects you see, the sounds you hear, the odors you smell, the touches you feel, the flavors you taste, and the interoceptive sensations you experience as aches and pains and affect . . . they all involve continuous sensory signals that are highly variable and ambiguous as they reach your brain. Your brain’s job is to predict them before they arrive, fill in missing details, and find regularities where possible, so that you experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, not the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that is really out there.6 To achieve this magnificent feat, your brain employs concepts to make the sensory signals meaningful, creating an explanation for where they came from, what they refer to in the world, and how to act on them. Your perceptions are so vivid and immediate that they compel you to believe that you experience the world as it is, when you actually experience a world of your own construction. Much of what you experience as the outside world begins inside your head. When you categorize using concepts, you go beyond the information available, just as you did when you perceived a bee within blobs.

It’s all connected, you see, young Breen. The earth, the air, the water that falls from the sky, the sun that brings the light and warmth. And all that grows—the plants, the animals, the people. The bees that buzz, the birds that fly, all bound together.

Scout envisaged a future when names could no longer fit into the boxes on forms which were supposed to contain them; a whirling accumulation of names that buzzed like a swarm of bees, and a time when a child would have to practise for years before they could spell their own name.

Where do wasps and bees go when they are sick? To the waspital!           What kind of suit does a bee wear to work? A buzzness suit!

Anxious to demonstrate her competence, Amelia strode to the other window and began jerking at the closed draperies. “Thank you, Mr. Rohan, but as you can see, I have the situation well in hand.” “I think I’ll stay. Having stopped you from falling through one window, I’d hate for you to go out the other.” “I won’t. I’ll be fine. I have everything under—” She tugged harder, and the rod clattered to the floor, just as the other had done. But unlike the other curtain, which had been lined with aged velvet, this one was lined with some kind of shimmering rippling fabric, some kind of— Amelia froze in horror. The underside of the curtain was covered with bees. Bees. Hundreds, no, thousands of them, their iridescent wings beating in an angry relentless hum. They lifted in a mass from the crumpled velvet, while more flew from a crevice in the wall, where an enormous hive simmered. They must have found their way into a hollow space from a decayed spot in the outer wall. The insects swarmed like tongues of flame around Amelia’s paralyzed form. She felt the blood drain from her face. “Oh, God—” “Don’t move.” Rohan’s voice was astonishingly calm. “Don’t swat at them.” She had never known such primal fear, welling up from beneath her skin, leaking through every pore. No part of her body seemed to be under her control. The air was boiling with them, bees and more bees. It was not going to be a pleasant way to die. Closing her eyes tightly, Amelia willed herself to be still, when every muscle strained and screamed for action. Insects moved in sinuous patterns around her, tiny bodies touching her sleeves, hands, shoulders. “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,” she heard Rohan say. Amelia highly doubted that. “These are not f-frightened bees.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “These are f-furious bees.” “They do seem a bit annoyed,” Rohan conceded, approaching her slowly. “It could be the dress you’re wearing—they tend not to like dark colors.” A short pause. “Or it could be the fact that you just ripped down half their hive.” “If you h-have the nerve to be amused by this—” She broke off and covered her face with her hands, trembling all over. His soothing voice undercut the buzzing around them. “Be still. Everything’s fine. I’m right here with you.” “Take me away,” she whispered desperately. Her heart was pounding too hard, making her bones shake, driving every coherent thought from her head. She felt him brush a few inquisitive insects from her hair and back. His arms went around her, his shoulder sturdy beneath her cheek. “I will, sweetheart.

had bees, for example, try to pollinate my nostril or ear because my red hair attracts them like a cluster of flowers, and once I get six legs and a pair of wings buzzing around in there, I forget about what I’m doing in

she was swept up in the cheery and excited swell of these girls, which carried her down North 7th Street toward Federal. They were like bees, she thought, buzzing and fairly harmless alone, but thrumming and dangerous as a group. She was caught up in the magic of this swarm as they made their way to the Woolworth’s.

The Hive Mind lifted their dream up into the blue and blazing air of summer, where the foragers swooped in daring and elegant flight. It took the bees down to the flowers in a kaleidoscope of beauty and wonder as if the foragers shared their skills, dreaming how to pack a pannier with rapid economy, how to tickle a flower to yield the sweetest nectar, and how to watch where the hoverflies gathered to tell that air was safe from Myriad.... The Cluster buzzed as it released its anxiety, and then every kin relaxed their minds and their knowledge poured out with joyful abandon, sharing detail after detail of their beloved communal life. The Hive Mind absorbed it all, and enlarged.

HE PARABLE OF A FLY IN A HONEYCOMB As a fly was searching for food, he spied a comb of honey in a corner. Overcome with longing, he began to buzz loudly: “Where is the noble fellow who will guide me into this honeycomb in exchange for a grain of barley? I wish to enter this hive because the bees seem so happy inside.” Someone took the fly’s grain of barley and let the insect into the hive. When the fly got busy with the honey, his feet became stuck. He floundered about until his joints grew weak. The more he struggled, the more stuck he became. “Help!” he cried out. “This honey kills worse than poison. I gave a grain of barley to enter this hive, but now I would give two to get out.” --- Distracted heart, you’ve spent your time in absentmindedness for an age, following fruitless pursuits. Where will you find another lifetime to correct this?

Job was a moon madman. At every lunar tide, the desperation of great souls, the dizziness of space only made him into a nubile hemisphere of extraordinary sensitivity. Emotion would swell the air bubble which lived off the walls of his brain and his reason flew away. He flung himself frantically in the mud, his face torn with happiness, his whole being activated by an invisible pointsman, his vocal cords vibrating like reeds. He would buzz from tree to tree, from window to window, like a bee searching for gold bullion. The guttural sea-voice reverberated in his ears, labyrinthine shells, and lost itself in the damp caverns of his skull. There was no more need to speak.

Trendle wanted to show that a political system could be riddled with corruption and that one man could successfully combat this white-collar lawlessness. He was entranced with the sound of a bee and wanted to incorporate that into the show. Osgood relates many experiments that soundmen were put through, trying to re-create the buzzing that Trendle remembered, of a bee trapped in a hotel room where he had once stayed.

A sated velvet bee tottered drunkenly out of the flowerbeds, humming lazily as it buzzed off into the blue beyond. She

I reach up to my hair, lifting it, squeezing water out of it down my back, and I know that the movement summons Luca’s attention back to me. I can feel his eyes on me now as I move closer to Evan on the lounger, looking at his hands moving on the strings, the typical girl admiring a boy playing a guitar. Evan flashes me a smile and keeps strumming away, quite unaware of the little drama being enacted around him. “Don’t forget, Vio-let,” he croons softly. And though I can’t really sing, not properly, I know the tune now, and my head leans in toward his as I join in on the last two words: “Dive in!” He finishes on a last, rising chord and lifts his head, our faces close now. The sunshine beats down on us; the blue water of the swimming pool glints brightly in the heat, the breeze raising tiny ripples on the surface. Evan’s eyes are as clear and blue as the water, with no hidden currents, no unexpected, dangerous undertow. The rosemary and lavender bushes planted around the verge are wafting a lovely, sun-warmed scent, bees buzzing in the lavender. It’s paradise. It should be paradise. In the parking lot below, tires screech. We all jump. Luca must be executing the tightest, sharpest three-point turn in history: the car scrapes, churns, tears up the gravel, and shoots out of the lot and down the drive so fast we wince. It snaps back and forth like Road Runner as he speeds downhill. Only a very good driver could make those switchback turns so fast without crashing--and he’s very lucky he didn’t meet anyone coming up. “Wow! I guess they have somewhere they really need to be,” Paige observes. “More like someone to get away from,” Kelly says dryly under her breath, so only I can hear her.

An instance of Gilbert's appreciation of other people's nonsense is his parody of Lear's verse: There was an old man in a tree Who was horribly bored by a bee; When they said, "Does it buzz?" He replied, "Yes, it does! It's a regular brute of a bee!" The parody attributed to Gilbert is called "A Nonsense Rhyme in Blank Verse": There was an old man of St. Bees, Who was stung in the arm by a wasp; When they asked, "Does it hurt?" He replied, "No, it doesn't, But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet!

The world we live in is a product of a grand dream … the dream of a Great Thinker; yes, the Big Poet. That’s why wherever you go, you hear the sweet music flowing about it … the chirping of crickets; the sough of the wind … The whistling of a bird, the gurgle of a stream. The buzz of the bees, the creaks of tree limbs. The chatter of monkeys, the patter of the rain …

The world we live in is a product of a grand dream … the dream of a Great Thinker; yes, the Big Poet. That’s why wherever you go, you hear the sweet music flowing about it … the chirping of crickets; the sough of the wind … The whistling of a bird, the gurgle of a stream. The buzz of the bees, the creaks of tree limbs. The chatter of monkeys, the patter of the rain …

It’s no surprise, however, that baseball and finally softball teams continued to adopt the honey bee as their mascot after World War II. With the issue of race becoming an explosive issue, sports and schools became the avenues for the American public to address racial and gender prejudice. Because Americans don’t have a national religion, sports provide a way for people to share rules and values. From the Burlington Bees to the Salt Lake Buzz, baseball teams chose the honey bee as their icon because such a symbol emphasized a tightly organized social infrastructure, which good baseball teams need.

An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled. No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath. Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear. Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

Soon we all will die. Our hopes and fears will be irrelevant. An illumines continuity of existence, which has no origin and which has never died. Human beings project all the images of life and death, terror and joy, demons and gods. These images become our complete reality, and we submit, without thinking, to their dance. In all the movements of this dance we project our greatest fears on death, and we make every effort to ignore it. Anything that has a shape will crumble away. Anything in a flock will disband. We are all like bees, alone in this world, buzzing and searching with no place to rest. So we offer this prayer: Delusions are as various as the reflections of the moon on a rippling sea. Beings become so easily caught in a net of confused pain. May I develop compassion as boundless as the sky, so that all may rest in the clear light of their own awareness.

And that leaves romance. This genre took me a little longer than the others to realize I also didn’t qualify for a leading role. My ex-fiancé, Brett, was the first to let me in on the secret, although I missed the clues to begin with because, as I’ve established, I’d never make it as a mystery-solving sleuth. But looking back, I can see the hints along the way even before he sat me down for the big reveal. The ebbing interest in his eyes when he looked at me. The loss of touch that coincided with the loss of my hair. The tie of attraction that had at one time bound him to me unraveling, until one day it just wasn’t there anymore. At least for him. At first, I convinced myself Brett’s actions and words had nothing to do with my heroine status and everything to do with demoting him from leading man to villain. I mean, it was classic villainous behavior for him to have such a shallow depth of feeling that he was no longer attracted to me and stopped loving me when I developed alopecia, an autoimmune disease in which my T cells sound the bugle cry to attack my hair follicles like the swarm of bees that kept Winnie the Pooh from the honey in the tree (that’s probably a strange analogy, but I subbed for Martha at story time yesterday and the toddlers and preschoolers made buzzing sounds when we came to that page, so it’s still fresh in my mind).

There are people gossiping on patios and balconies, enjoying the sunshine. Friends sit on benches, bees buzz around bushes, light breezes play tunes with ice cubes. Chris finds the whole thing deeply infuriating. He’s a wind-and-rain guy, a turn-up-the-collar-on-your-overcoat man. If Chris had his way he would hibernate for the summer. He has not worn shorts since 1987.

Secrets, though, were like the bees their mum had kept when they were a child They buzzed inside you, and could be made docile with smoke and sugar-syrup words but, at some point, they came out of the hive with a sting then died

By the time he planted his first seed and watched it bloom into a bright white daisy, Hart began to feel what he suspected his mom felt every time she was out in the gardens. The joy sprouted on the stem, and in his soul. While other boys were becoming interested in video games, or sports, or breaking rules, Hart got really into flowers. There were some areas in the garden where the flowers grew so high and bountiful that you could walk through them and get lost in tiny worlds. Whole colorful planets at his fingertips. To Hart, there was nothing like it. Cupping a sorbet-colored ball of dahlia in the palm of his hand, breathing in the musky-sweet notes of jasmine, watching the pollen-dressed bees buzzing in the fluff. The flowers made something in Hart's soul stir. Or settle. Or float. He wasn't sure what, but it felt like he'd discovered a secret that no one else knew about. That all you needed to feel perfectly in balance with the world were flowers.

Friends sit on benches, bees buzz around bushes, light breezes play tunes with ice cubes. Chris finds the whole thing deeply infuriating. He’s a wind-and-rain guy, a turn-up-the-collar-on-your-overcoat man. If Chris had his way he would hibernate for the summer. He has not worn shorts since 1987.

My feelings for him then were loud. Like a swarm of bees that never stopped buzzing. But my feelings now are different. They’re quiet. Deep. Growing in depth and intensity the more layers he peels back and the more I discover about him. He feels something too – I can sense it – but he’s following my lead, gauging each interaction, being patient, playing chess.

She did not always realize her lack of communication with others, the living, their depths, for it was the ghost of love she loved the most, and that was always present. There was never an empty moment—or if so, never an acknowledged one. Phantoms buzzing around her like wild honey bees...

Like his neighbors who had eked out a living in the rich soil lining Gaza’s borders, Abu Rahman had lost virtually everything at the hands of the Israelis. In 2005, Israeli bulldozers razed his citrus grove to extend the buffer zone, wiping out trees that provided oranges throughout the Gaza Strip. They then destroyed the wells he used to irrigate his land. And when they returned that summer, they leveled his four-story home, killed his flock of eighty goats and incinerated the five tons of wheat he had stored there. Bees buzzed from out of the first floor, which lay below three layers of concrete floor like a destruction sandwhich, the only survivors of his apiary. “In the blink of an eye, everything my father worked for, for seventy years, was gone,” Rahman said.

the girl who gets excluded from a crowd she previously belonged to; the newcomer who fails to be accepted by other girls no matter what she does; the girl who is somehow different and targeted for that reason; or the popular Queen Bee, who buzzes from place to place spreading discomfort and manipulating others with her words. Sounds pretty juvenile, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, some women never outgrow these behaviors,

Friends sit on benches, bees buzz around bushes, light breezes play tunes with ice cubes. Chris finds the whole thing deeply infuriating. He’s a wind-and-rain guy, a turn-up-the-collar-on-your-overcoat man. If Chris had his way he would hibernate for the summer.

Vianne Mauriac left the cool, stucco-walled kitchen and stepped out into her front yard. On this beautiful summer morning in the Loire Valley, everything was in bloom. White sheets flapped in the breeze and roses tumbled like laughter along the ancient stone wall that hid her property from the road. A pair of industrious bees buzzed among the blooms; from far away, she heard the chugging purr of a train and then the sweet sound of a little girl’s laughter. Sophie.