Bee Quotes and Sayings
Our collection of bee quotes and sayings will keep you as busy as a bee.
When you buy just 16 ounces of honey, there are a thousand bees behind it that traveled over a hundred thousand miles and visited more than 4.5 million flowers.
It is no wonder that many great men and women have been inspired to study these beautiful creatures and write amazing phrases, poems, and songs on them. It is not just about their beauty and inspiring hard work. Bees are also essential for human existence.
Honey bees are so important to humans that they are the most studied creatures, second only to human beings. Here are some beautiful bee quotes from some famous folks.
Best Quotes Bees
1.) Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t, they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
Ray Bradbury
2.) If we die, we’re taking you with us.
The Bees
3.) We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between, we garden.
Unknown
4.) The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
William Blake
5.) A bee is an exquisite chemist.
Royal Beekeeper to Charles II
6.) The bee is domesticated but not tamed.
William Longgood
7.) When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.
Srikumar Rao
If you’re enjoying bee quotes, you’ll also want to review our 137 Bee Puns.
Good Quotes About Bees
8.) Words are like bees – some create honey, and others leave a sting.
Unknown
9.) You are the bee’s knees.
A popular saying in the 1920s like cat’s pajamas
10.) Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
11.) That which is not good for the bee hive cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius
12.) Take time to smell the roses, and eventually, you’ll inhale a bee.
Unknown
13.) If bees only gathered nectar from perfect flowers, they wouldn’t be able to make even a single drop of honey.
Matshona Dhliwayo
14.) How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower!
Isaac Watts
15.) For bees, the flower is the fountain of life/For flowers. The bee is the messenger of love.
Kahlil Gibran
Best Bee Quotes
16.) The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For a man, it is to know that and to wonder at it.
Jacques Yves Cousteau
17.) If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Maurice Maeterlinck
18.) The men of the experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee…gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
Leonardo da Vinci
19.) The lovely flowers embarrass me, They make me regret I am not a bee.
Emily Dickinson
20.) Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
John Muir
21.) Let us linger a while in the wonderful old Lilac walk. It is a glory of tender green and shaded amethyst and the grateful hum of bees, the very voice of Spring.
Alice Morse Earle
22.) It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.
Sue Monk Kidd
23.) To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson
The Hum
24.) The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.
Elizabeth Lawrence
25.) We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are, in truth, nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.
Muriel Barbery
26.) Don’t wear perfume in the garden — unless you want to be pollinated by bees.
Anne Raver
27.) A bee is never as busy as it seems; it’s just that it can’t buzz any slower.
Kin Hubbard
28.) Keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
Henry David Thoreau
29.) The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee, a clover, anytime, to him, is aristocracy.
Emily Dickinson
30.) The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.
Saint Francis de Sales
31.) A work of art; and yet no art of man,
Can work, this work, these little creatures can.
Geffrey Whitney
32.) One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees…
Leo Tolstoy
33.) Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what’s in a name?
Helen Hunt Jackson
34.) The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.
St. John Chrysostom
Busy Bee Quotes
35.) The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.
Karl Von Frisch
36.) Listen to the bees and let them guide you.
Brother Adam
37.) Every saint has a bee in his halo.
Elbert Hubbard
38.) He is not worthy of the honeycomb/That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.
William Shakespeare
39.) I don’t like to hear cut-and-dried sermons. No – when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Abraham Lincoln
40.) Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison flowers.
John Keats
41.) The siren heralds a friend, the bee a stranger.
Hilda M. Ransome
42.) Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
Nietzsche
43.) Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise/Their Master’s flower, but leave it having done/As fair as ever and as fit to use/So both the flower doth stay and honey run.
George Herbert
Buzzing Bee Quotes
44.) If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.
Albert Einstein
45.) Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee – His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.
Muhammad Ali
46.) That which is not good for the bee-hive, cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius
47.) A swarm of bees in May is worth a load Of hay, But a swarm in July is not worth a fly.
J. Ray
48.) It is not how busy you are, but why you are busy — the bee is praised, and the mosquito is swatted.
Unknown
Tips for how to help save bees.
Honey Bee Quotations
49.) For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.
William Shakespeare
50.) No bees, no honey; no work, no money.
Proverb
51.) We’re all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night, aren’t we honey?
Bette Davis
52.) The secret of my health is applying honey inside and oil outside.
Democritus
53.) The only reason for being a bee that I know of is to make honey… And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.
Winnie the Pooh
54.) If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.
Abraham Lincoln
55.) For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Jonathan Swift
56.) Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice…nature is free because it is not invoiced because it is not priced because it is not traded in markets; we tend to ignore it.
Pavan Sukhdev
57.) If you have no honey in your pot, have some in your mouth.
Benjamin Franklin
A Bee Fun Fact
58.) Honeybees pollinate 80 percent of the United States’ insect crops – over $20 billion worth of crops each year – according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.
Check out Sunflower Fun Facts.
The Secret Life of Bees Quotes
59.) Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn’t know a thing about life.
Sue Monk Kidd
60.) Well, if you have a queen and a group of independent-minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you’ve got a swarm.
August
61.) If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.
Sue Monk Kidd
62.) Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest.
August
63.) It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
Sue Monk Kidd
64.) Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.
August
65.) After you get stung, you can’t get unstung
no matter how much you whine about it.
Sue Monk Kidd
66.) When I’m dead and gone, That’s what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I’ll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.
Sue Monk Kidd
Akeelah and the Bee Quotes
67.) You know that feeling where everything feels right? Where you don’t have to worry about tomorrow or yesterday, where you feel safe and know you’re doing the best you can? There’s a word for that, it’s called love. L-O-V-E.
Akeelah
68.) Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
Akeelah
69.) Okay. But when I’m at the bee, and they tell me to spell some little fish from Australia or some weird bacteria on the moon, we’re going to wish we’d done a little bit more rote-memorizing and not so much essay reading. If you don’t mind me saying.
Akeelah
Queen Bee Sayings
70.) I’m just getting better and better. It’s just like a bunch of worker bees protecting the king bee because I’m not a queen bee. I’m a king bee.
Shaquille O’Neal
71.) To be successful, one has to be one of three bees: the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in.
Suzy Kassem
72.) He is not worthy of the honey-comb/That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.
William Shakespeare
73.) Just as the queen bee, the highest-ranking, a peerless creature of her hive, is surrounded by lowly drones to please her, whereas the workers produce honey, the same way is the one who sits on the throne an equal only to himself and no one’s companion.
Franz Grillparzer
74.) The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee…gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
Leonardo da Vinci
75.) The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness, and in the taste confounds the appetite.
William Shakespeare
76.) We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
Marcus Aurelius
Bumblebee Quotes
77.) Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it, so it goes on flying anyway.
Mary Kay Ash
78.) Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.
Ashley Smith
79.) It was the bumblebee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.
Meridel Le Sueur
80.) When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumblebees;
critics do, they sound like sewing machines.
Mason Cooley
81.) I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself, and getting as close to the bees’ lives as they will let me—remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human.
Sue Hubbell
82.) Work hard; stay bumble.
Unknown
Of Bees and Honey Quotations
83.) A bounty of honey is worth a little sting.
Unknown
84.) That which is not good for the bee hive cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius
85.) Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
Ray Bradbury
By Michael O’Halloran
Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and four on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market, most of which deal with wordplay. Mike is married and a father of four daughters.
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