21x20 Media presents

Busy as a Bee

A worker bee with a tower of paperwork is far too busy to talk, and where "busy as a bee" comes from.

She's swamped. Take a number.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "as bisy as bees" in the Canterbury Tales in the 1390s, and it was not a compliment. Isaac Watts gave children "How doth the little busy bee" in 1715, Lewis Carroll turned it into a crocodile in 1865, and in 1949 the scientist Martin Lindauer watched one worker bee, number 107, for nearly 177 hours and logged almost 69 of them as idle.

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Studio21x20 Media
FormatAnimated short
Runtime1 minute, 14 seconds
Published

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