Sue Hubbell

“The Ozarks are old and worn mountains from the geological past.”

“Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.”

“I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees' lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Crickets are immaculately clean, harmless animals.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Maine is a movable music festival in the summertime.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“My crickets found me.”