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.

Strictly speaking, one never 'keeps' bees - one comes to terms with their wild nature.

My bees cover one thousand square miles of land that I do not own in their foraging flights, flying from flower to flower for which I pay no rent, stealing nectar but pollinating plants in return.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season's end.

Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen.