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" Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils. They can be kept anywhere. "

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" I spend a lot of time sizing up a tree before I fell it. Once it's down, I clear away the brush around the tree before I start cutting it into lengths so I won't trip and lose my balance with the chain saw running. "

" Maine is a movable music festival in the summertime. "

" I married a university professor, raised a son, and worked as an academic librarian. My husband and I moved to the Ozarks, bought a farm, and started a commercial beekeeping business. And divorced. "

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

" Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. "

" Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. "

" Greer is Missouri's second-largest spring. It is a place of pounding, frothing waters and of greeny-cool moss-covered rock, a place of fern and cliffy splendor. "

" Our family was like no one else's. My schoolfriends had fathers and grandfathers and uncles who did things, but in my family, women had been the doers. "

" Great Wass Island Preserve is a 1,579-acre Nature Conservancy jewel, a place of spectacular botanical interest, and Jonesport is situated on a postcard-pretty harbor. Tourism is not serious business in those parts - boat building and fishing are - and there are no signs telling how to get to Great Wass. But I know. "

" 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. "

" Crickets are immaculately clean, harmless animals. "

" I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced. "

" For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can't think why. "

" It gets cold here in the Ozarks in the winter. There are often warm winter days, but there are also weeks when the temperature never climbs above freezing. "

" Every spring, I begin cutting my firewood for the upcoming winter. It should be cut months ahead of time so it will dry and cure. "

" Otherness is what I have always liked about bugs. "

" All chain saws are formidable and dangerous. "

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

" 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. "

" You have to take springtime on its own terms in the Ozarks: there is no other way. It can't be predicted. It is unsteady, full of promise, promise that is sometimes broken. It is also bawdy, irrepressible, excessive, fecund, willful. "

" 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. "

" In the wild, those traits that are adaptive for survival and reproductive advantage are brought out through natural selection. So cats that were fierce, furtive hunters, alert to the snapping of every twig, with coats that gave them good camouflage, would have been favored by evolution. "

" Healthy camel crickets spend a lot of their waking hours grooming, so I have learned to recognize the ones that will soon die because they walk about encrusted with sand and bits of litter, having lost all interest in keeping clean. "

" I've lived all over the country - Michigan, California, Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, now, Maine - but I never understood springtime until I spent 25 years farming in the Ozarks. "

" It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end. "

" A rule about portages: the longer and harder they are, the fewer people will make them. "

" Nothing gives a person more confidence... than to be zipped snugly inside a bee suit. "

" I've never been much for becoming a member of a group. "

" We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things. "

" My crickets found me. "