The pedigree of honey
~Emily Dickinson
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
We should all be more like bees. That is my takeaway from this poem.
As a beekeeper, though, I’ve just emerged from an internet rabbit hole where I’ve been attempting to figure out whether Emily Dickinson should have known that worker bees are female. Apparently, while some beekeeping scientists did discover this fact as early as the early 1800s, it was not widely accepted for about a hundred years. So I guess I can forgive Emily her ignorance on this particular topic. I wonder if knowing this bit of information would have changed any of her poetry–or her imagining–in any way. She wrote so many poems about or including bees–I wonder what might have shifted if she had known that the bees she was describing were almost entirely female.
The Emily Project 