...we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.

- Jonathan Swift

The life of the bee is like a magic well, the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.

- Karl von Frisch

That buzzing noise means something. Now, the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you are... a bee! And the only reason for being a bee is to make honey. And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.

- Winnie the Pooh

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

- Henry David Thoreau

Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

- Proverbs 16:24

Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from 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.

- United Nations report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity

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

- John Muir

A work of arte; and yet no arte of man, Can worke, this worke, these little creatures can

- Geffrey Whitney, 1586

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

The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it.

- Jacques Yves Cousteau