[L]et us linger awhile in the wonderful old Lilac walk. It is a glory of tender green and shaded amethyst and grateful hum of bees, the very voice of Spring. – Alice Morse Earle, “In Lilac Tide,” Old-Time Gardens Newly Set Forth, 1901

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. – James Russell Lowell

Books are the beehives of thought; laconics, the honey taken from them. – James Ellis, quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899

[T]he bees will buzz you a welcome from the hives at the end, and then the trees will stoop down about you, and you can look up into a green sky set with constellations of apples. – Margaret Troili, “Woods of Mendocino,” Out West: A Magazine of the O