Spring starts in January in the Ozarks, lurches on in a complicated way, with spurts and setbacks, until May. Then, early in May, there is a cold spell known as blackberry winter because it comes when blackberries bloom. It is a worrisome week for anyone who farms.

Sue Hubbell

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.

Sue Hubbell

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.

Sue Hubbell

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.

Sue Hubbell

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

Sue Hubbell

My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room.

Sue Hubbell

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.

Sue Hubbell

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

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.

Sue Hubbell

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

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

Sue Hubbell

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

Sue Hubbell

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

Sue Hubbell

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.

Sue Hubbell

Maine is a movable music festival in the summertime.

Sue Hubbell

Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.

Sue Hubbell

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

Sue Hubbell

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

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

Sue Hubbell

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

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.

Sue Hubbell