SPONSORED BY NATURAL APIARY BEEKEEPING SUPPLIES - Key Persons
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.