honeybees = "the soul of summer"

Thumbing through Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee tonight, I came upon this lovely bit of unabashedly enthused nature prose, and thought I'd share.

"The bees give their honey and sweet-smelling wax to the man who attends them; but more precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months; for events in which bees take part happen only when skies are pure, at the winsome hours of the year when flowers keep holiday. They are soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty; they are the untiring wing on which delicate perfumes float; the guide of the quivering light-ray, the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad fragile joys that are born in the heat and dwell in the sunshine. They teach us how to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good, natural hours. To him who has known them and loved them, a summer where there there are no bees becomes as sad and as empty as one without flowers or birds."