The birds and the bees

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As a child just starting secondary school I was quite quiet and shy and didn’t really know anyone so I was an obvious target to pick on. Sometimes the older or more popular kids would try to catch me out by asking me things they thought I wouldn’t understand so they could then make fun of me. Of course I knew what they were aiming at and they were not very clever so I could tell what they hoped I would say, so it didn’t work for them. I do remember though that they liked to ask ‘Do you know about the birds and the bees?’ Of course I said yes, but really I was rather puzzled. I did know about sex and where babies came from, but I couldn’t figure out what birds and bees had to do with it. I thought perhaps it was some sort of euphemism for men and women, but then birds and bees don’t normally have anything to do with each other (except in the case of bee-eaters) so that didn’t make any sense. I thought it should have been something like ‘the bees and the flowers’ for example, because bees enter into flowers and pollinate them… This puzzled me for years and as a no-longer-shy adult I asked many people about it and eventually concluded that in fact there is no connection. The best anyone could come up with was that it must have originated from the song by Cole Porter with the lyrics ‘Birds do, bees do it, even educated fleas do it; let’s do it, let’s fall in love’ but then falling in love and sex are not at all the same either, so perhaps it was the rather juvenile use of the phrase ‘let’s do it’ that made the connection? Did you hear expressions that puzzled you as a child and did you ever work out what they meant, or if they meant anything? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2015.