As busy as a bee. [ Lyly ]

His labor is a chant.
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon! [ Emily Dickinson ]

The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy. [ Emily Dickinson ]

A dead bee maketh no honey. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Every bee's honey is sweet. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

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

As brisk as a bee in a tar-pot. [ Proverb ]

She hath a gad-bee in her tail. [ Proverb ]

O! as a bee upon the flower, I hang
Upon the honey of thy eloquent tongue. [ Bulwer ]

Oh! call my brother back to me!
I cannot play alone;
The summer comes with flower and bee -
Where is my brother gone? [ Mrs. Hemans ]

The honey is sweet, but the bee stings. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing.
In his wandering. [ Oscar Wilde ]

Beautiful objects of the wild-bee's love. [ Nicoll ]

The little bee returns with evening's gloom,
To join her comrades in the braided hive,
Where, housed beside their mighty honeycomb,
They dream their polity shall long survive. [ Charles (Tennyson) Turner ]

The honey-bee that wanders all day long
The field, the woodland, and the garden over.
To gather in his fragrant winter store.
Humming in calm content his winter song,
Seeks not alone the rose's glowing breast,
The lily's dainty cup, the violet's lips.
But from all rank and noxious weeds he sips
The single drop of sweetness closely pressed
Within the poison chalice. [ Anne C. Lynch Botta ]

There is nothing can equal the tender hours
When life is first in bloom,
When the heart like a bee, in a wild of flowers,
Finds everywhere perfume;
When the present is all and it questions not
If those flowers shall pass away,
But pleased with its own delightful lot,
Dreams never of decay. [ Bohn ]

He has a bee in his bonnet (i.e. is hare-brained). [ Scotch Proverb ]

Where the bee sucks honey the spider sucks poison. [ Proverb ]

He is timorous indeed that is afraid of a dead bee. [ Proverb ]

Look on the bee upon the wing among flowers;
How brave, how bright his life! then mark him hiv'd,
Cramp'd, cringing in his self-built, social cell,
Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men
Lie deep in cities as in drifts. [ Bailey ]

Better two drones be preserved than one good bee perish. [ Proverb ]

The bee from her industry in the summer eats honey all the winter. [ Proverb ]

Sin is like the bee, with honey in its mouth but a sting in its tail. [ H. Ballou ]

The flowers are full of honey, but only the bee finds out the sweetness. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty. [ Joubert ]

That which is not for the interest of the whole swarm is not for the interest of a single bee. [ Marcus Aurelius ]

Many-colored, sunshine-loving, spring-betokening bee! yellow bee, so mad for love of early-blooming flowers! [ Professor Wilson ]

I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it. [ Colton ]

There never was any party, faction, sect, or cabal whatsoever, in which the most ignorant were not the most violent; for a bee is not a busier animal than a blockhead. [ Pope ]

Revenge commonly hurts both the offerer and sufferer; as we see in a foolish bee, which in her anger invenometh the flesh and loseth her sting, and so lives a drone ever after. [ Bishop Hall ]

We should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower; she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it; and those sweets she herself improves and concocts into honey. [ C. C. Cotton ]

The virtuous delight in the virtuous; but he who is destitute of the practice of virtue delighteth not in the virtuous. The bee retireth from the forest to the lotus, whilst the frog is destitute of shelter. [ Hitopadesa ]

The bee is enclosed, and shines preserved, in a tear of the sisters of Phaeton, so that it seems enshrined in its own nectar. It has obtained a worthy reward for its great toils; we may suppose that the bee itself would have desired such a death. [ Martial ]

Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]