page_title: Bumblebee
section_title: In music and literature
hierarchical_section_title: Bumblebee / Relationship to humans / In music and literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Daguerreotype of the poet Emily Dickinson, taken circa 1848. (Original version.) From the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts &amp; Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
context_page_description: A bumblebee is any of over 250 species in the genus Bombus, part of Apidae, one of the bee families. This genus is the only extant group in the tribe Bombini, though a few extinct related genera are known from fossils. They are found primarily in higher altitudes or latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, although they are also found in South America where a few lowland tropical species have been identified. European bumblebees have also been introduced to New Zealand and Tasmania. Female bumblebees can sting repeatedly, but generally ignore humans and other animals.
  Most bumblebees are social insects that form colonies with a single queen. The colonies are smaller than those of honey bees, growing to as few as 50 individuals in a nest. Cuckoo bumblebees are brood parasitic and do not make nests; their queens aggressively invade the nests of other bumblebee species, kill the resident queens and then lay their own eggs, which are cared for by the resident workers. Cuckoo bumblebees were previously classified as a separate genus, but are now usually treated as members of Bombus.
  Bumblebees have round bodies covered in soft hair called pile, making them appear and feel fuzzy.
context_section_description: The orchestral interlude Flight of the Bumblebee was composed (c. 1900) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It represents the turning of Prince Guidon into a bumblebee so he can fly away to visit his father, Tsar Saltan, in the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, although the music may reflect the flight of a bluebottle rather than a bumblebee. The music inspired Walt Disney to feature a bumblebee in his 1940 animated musical Fantasia and have it sound as if it were flying in all parts of the theater. This early attempt at "surround sound" was unsuccessful, and the music was excluded from the film's release.
  In 1599, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, someone, possibly Tailboys Dymoke, published Caltha Poetarum: Or The Bumble Bee, under the pseudonym "T. Cutwode". This was one of nine books censored under the Bishop's Ban issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and the Bishop of London Richard Bancroft.
  Emily Dickinson made a bumblebee the subject of her parody of Isaac Watts's well-known poem about honeybees, How Doth the Little Busy Bee (1715). Where Watts wrote "How skilfully she builds her cell! How neat she spreads the wax!", Dickinson's poem, "The Bumble-Bee's Religion" (1881) begins "His little Hearse-like Figure / Unto itself a Dirge / To a delusive Lilac / The vanity divulge / Of Industry and Morals / And every righteous thing / For the divine Perdition / of Idleness and Spring." The letter was said to have enclosed a dead bee.
  The entomologist Otto Plath wrote Bumblebees and Their Ways in 1934. His daughter, the poet Sylvia Plath, wrote a group of poems about bees late in 1962, within four months of her suicide, transforming her father's interest into her poetry.
  The scientist and illustrator Moses Harris (1731–1785) painted accurate watercolour drawings of bumblebees in his An Exposition of English Insects Including the Several Classes of Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, & Diptera, or Bees, Flies, & Libellulae (1776–80).
  Bumblebees appear as characters, often eponymously, in children's books. The surname Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series (1997–2007) is an old name for bumblebee. J. K. Rowling said the name "seemed to suit the headmaster, because one of his passions is music and I imagined him walking around humming to himself". J. R. R. Tolkien, in his poem Errantry, also used the name Dumbledor, but for a large bee-like creature.
  Among the many books for younger children are Bumble the Bee by Yvon Douran and Tony Neal (2014); Bertie Bumble Bee by K. I. Al-Ghani (2012); Ben the Bumble Bee: How do bees make honey? by Romessa Awadalla (2015); Bumble Bee Bob Has a Big Butt by Papa Campbell (2012); Buzz, Buzz, Buzz! Went Bumble-bee by Colin West (1997); Bumble Bee by Margaret Wise Brown (2000); How the Bumble Came to Bee by Paul and Ella Quarry (2012); The Adventures of Professor Bumble and the Bumble Bees by Stephen Brailovsky (2010). Among Beatrix Potter's "little books", Babbity Bumble and other members of her nest appear in The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse (1910).
caption: Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about a bumblebee. Daguerreotype, c. 1848
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