Strictly speaking, one never ‘keeps’ bees – one comes to terms with their wild nature. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
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. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
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. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
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. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
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. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
Sometimes, I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest-building has lost its charm. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
A rule about portages: the longer and harder they are, the fewer people will make them. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
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. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
We live in a world in which there are many live things other than human beings, and many of these things can seem beautiful and amusing and interesting to us if they can catch our attention and if we can step back from our crabbed and limiting and lonely anthropocentricity to consider them. Sue Hubbell Read Quote
