excerpt from On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

The everyday alchemy of creating food for the body and the mind. This 17th-century

woodcut compares the alchemical ("chymick") work of the bee and the scholar, who

transform nature's raw materials into honey and knowledge. Whenever we cook we

become practical chemists, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of generations,

and transforming what the Earth offers us into more concentrated forms of pleasure

and nourishment.

(The first Latin caption reads "Thus we bees make honey, not for ourselves"; the second,

"All things in books," the library being the scholar's hive. Woodcut from the collection of the

International Bee Research Association.)

Speaking of bees, military scientists and insect nerds have recently found the cause of the colony collapse of honey bees - a concoction of fungus and virus.