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

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" Crickets are immaculately clean, harmless animals. "

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

" Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes, I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest-building has lost its charm. "

" 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. "

" I am an early riser. "

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

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

" I know a number of coastal trails in downeast Maine, all of them interesting. "

" Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" My crickets found me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All chain saws are formidable and dangerous. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I started collecting crickets to study them. Now I expect they will be my companions for many years to come. "