Some of these are only indirectly connected to bees. All of them are somewhere on my beekeeping web site to make a point about beekeeping:
"Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart. Let?s stop pretending that something else is going on. We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops. Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less--we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock. We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming - anything rather than face up to what?s really happening. We are losing the ability to take care of living things." - Kirk Webster
"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." - George Bernard Shaw
"Everything works if you let it"--James "Big Boy" Medlin
"The master accomplishes more and more by doing less and less until finally he accomplishes everything by doing nothing." --Laozi, Tao Te Ching
"Perfection in beekeeping is not found in a multiplicity of appliances, but in simplicity and the elimination of everything not absolutely essential" --Brother Adam, In Search of the Best Bee Strains
"Progress doesn't come from early risers - progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." --Robert Heinlein
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."--Bruce Lee
"In general, the simpler the system, the more efficient and the larger the amount of work which can be accomplished in a given time."--Frank Pellet, Practical Queen Rearing
"There are few solutions as universal in their application and their success than adding a frame of open brood and eggs every week for three weeks. It is a virtual panacea for any queen issues. It gives the bees the pheromones to suppress laying workers. It gives them more workers coming in during a period where there is no laying queen. It does not interfere if there is a virgin queen. It gives them the resources to rear a queen. It is virtually foolproof and does not require finding a queen or seeing eggs. If you have any issue with queenrightness, no brood, worried that there is no queen, this is the simple solution that requires no worrying, no waiting, no hoping. You just give them what they need to resolve the situation. If you have any doubts about the queenrightness of a hive, give them some open brood and eggs and sleep well. Repeat once a week for two more weeks if you still aren't sure. By then things will be fine."--Michael Bush
"Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something."--Morihei Ueshiba
"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. " - Albert Einstein
"If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything."--Michael Bush
"If you're not confused, you're not learning anything."--Michael Bush
"Who is there that can make muddy water clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually become clear of itself. Who is there that can secure a state of absolute repose? But let time go on, and the state of repose will gradually arise."--Laozi, Tao Te Ching
"We have never known what we were doing because we have never known what we were undoing. We cannot know what we are doing until we know what nature would be doing if we were doing nothing"--Wendell Berry "Home Economics"
"There are a few rules of thumb that are useful guides. One is that when you are confronted with some problem in the apiary and you do not know what to do, then do nothing. Matters are seldom made worse by doing nothing and are often made much worse by inept intervention." --The How-To-Do-It book of Beekeeping, Richard Taylor
"Pessimism never won any battle."?Dwight D. Eisenhower
"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit."?Helen Keller
"Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world."?George Bernard Shaw
"The leading cause of problems is solutions."--Sevareid's Law, Eric Sevareid
"The one error we humans are most prone to is the need to "do something even if it?s wrong." This flaw in thinking has kept physicians in business for the last several millennia. It is the reason that Hypocrites felt it necessary to point out "first, do no harm." There are many times in life that there is nothing to be done and anything we do will only make things worse."--Michael Bush
"You can?t get the right answer when you are asking the wrong question."--Michael Bush
"All models are wrong, but some are useful" --George E.P. Box
"We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are"--Anais Nin
"unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction."--Jacques Derrida (1991) Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, published in the English translation of Limited Inc., pp.123-4, 126
"If you think you can or you think you can?t, you are right"--Henry Ford
"We're trying to ensure the failure of modern beekeeping by focusing too much on single traits; by ignoring the elements of Wildness; and by constantly treating the bees. The biggest mistake of all is to continue viewing mites and other "pests" as enemies that must be destroyed, instead of allies and teachers that are trying to show us a path to a better future. The more virulent a parasite is, the more powerful a tool it can be for improving stocks and practice in the future. All the boring and soul-destroying work of counting mites on sticky boards, killing brood with liquid nitrogen, watching bees groom each other, and measuring brood hormone levels---all done in thousands of replications---will someday be seen as a colossal waste of time when we finally learn to let the Varroa mites do these things for us."--Kirk Webster, What's missing from the current discussion and work related to bees that's preventing us from making good progress.
"Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal."--Ben Franklin
"I have never yet counted even a single sample of mites from any of my bees. I consider counting mites as a way of evaluating Varroa resistance to be fraught with all sorts of shortcomings and difficulties. It's very time consuming and hence the size of the apiary, the number of colonies tested, the gene pool, and the income available all start to shrink. It's also very easy for the results to be skewed by mites migrating from other colonies or bee yards. "?Kirk Webster
"You don't grok the desert by counting the grains of sand."--Robert Heinlein, A Stranger in a Strange Land
"Most problems are imaginary. Most solutions are illusions."--Michael Bush
"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America"--James Joyce
"The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it has been already of old time, which was before us."--Ecclesiastes 1:9,10
"Following the teachings of G. M. Doolittle, in whose ideas I have great confidence, I think there is better chance for the moisture to dry out of unpainted hives than out of painted ones. I have seen a painted hive in my cellar damp and moldy when all the unpainted ones were in much better condition."--C.C. Miller
"In my earlier beekeeping years I was often sorely puzzled at the diametrically opposite views often expressed by the different correspondents for the bee journals. In extension of that state of mind I may say that at that time I did not dream of the wonderful differences of locality in its relation to the management of bees. I saw, measured weighted, compared, and considered all things apicultural by the standard of my own home--Genesee County, Michigan. It was not until I had seen the fields of New York white with buckwheat, admired the luxuriance of sweet-clover growth in the suburbs of Chicago, followed for miles the great irrigating ditches of Colorado, where they give lift to the royal purple of the alfalfa bloom, and climbed mountains in California, pulling myself up by grasping the sagebrush, that I fully realized the great amount of apicultural meaning stored up in that one little word--locality." --W.Z. Hutchinson, Advanced Bee Culture
"...avoid the mistake of attempting to follow several leaders or systems. Much confusion and annoyance will be saved if he adopts the teachings, methods, and appliances of some one successful beekeeper. He may make the mistake of not choosing the best system, but better this than a mixture of several systems."--W.Z. Hutchinson, Advanced Bee Culture
"Whether beasts think or not, it is positive that they conduct themselves in thousands of occasions as if they did think; the illusion in this matter, if it be an illusion, was well arranged for us. But without intending to touch upon this great question, and whatever be the cause let us for a moment surrender ourselves to appearances and use every day language."--Jean Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan, 18th century naturalist, quoted by Francis Huber in New Observations on Bees
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth." --Blaise Pascal
"People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others."--Blaise Pascal
"'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes his own." --Alexander Pope
"When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true." --Blaise Pascal
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact."--Mark Twain
"...the perception of complexity is narcissistic injury. If it's complex it's against you. If it's complex it's an insult. In other words, everything that is complex is perceived as a direct attack ... for the very simple reason, that the vast majority of people cannot perceive, cannot understand complexity... for them it's a challenge. They feel challenged by the very fact that it's complex. So they resent complexity."--Sam Vaknin, in YouTube interview with Richard Grannon
"The bulk of the world?s knowledge is an imaginary construction."--Helen Keller
"It will be readily appreciated that in the course of many years and daily contact with bees, the professional bee-keeper will of necessity gain a knowledge and insight into the mysterious ways of the honeybee, usually denied to the scientist in the laboratory and the amateur in possession of a few colonies. Indeed, a limited practical experience will inevitably lead to views and conclusions, which are often completely at variance to the findings of a wide practical nature. The professional bee-keeper is at all times compelled to assess things realistically and to keep an open mind in regard to every problem he may be confronted with. He is also forced to base his methods of management on concrete results and must sharply differentiate between essentials and inessentials."--Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey, Brother Adam
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."--Mark Twain
"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."--Bruce Lee
"One does not divine the ways of nature, it lays out methods that confound our science, and it is only by studying it carefully that we may succeed in unveiling some of its mysteries."--Francis Huber, New Observations on Bees Volume II
"You can present some data to an intellectual and an intellectual will say 'well, yes it works in practice but will it work in theory?' "--Bill Whittle
"Post hoc ergo proptor hoc" (After this therefore because of this)--The primary error in logic
"The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble." --Blaise Pascal
"...a rose is not necessarily and unqualifiedly a rose... it is a very different biochemical system at noon and at midnight."--Colin Pittendrigh, 1965.
"It has been stated by a number of beekeepers who should know better (including myself) that the bees are in such a hurry to rear a queen that they choose larvae too old for best results. later observation has shown the fallacy of this statement and has convinced me that bees do the very best that can be done under existing circumstances."--Jay Smith, Better Queens
"If it were true, as formerly believed, that queenless bees are in such haste to rear a queen that they will select a larva too old for the purpose, then it would hardly do to wait even nine days. A queen is matured in fifteen days from the time the egg is laid, and is fed throughout her larval lifetime on the same food that is given to a worker-larva during the first three days of its larval existence. So a worker-larva more than three days old, or more than six days from the laying of the egg would be too old for a good queen. If, now, the bees should select a larva more than three days old, the queen would emerge in less than nine days. I think no one has ever known this to occur. Bees do not prefer too old larvae. As a matter of fact bees do not use such poor judgment as to select larvae too old when larvae sufficiently young are present, as I have proven by direct experiment and many observations."--Fifty Years Among the Bees, C.C. Miller
Topic: Sayings that are or should bee (Read 928 times)