Whenever I heard the phrase “the birds and the bees,” I know it means sex education. This is because my parents always had books available for our age level around the house at our eye level. They did not hide the facts from us. She definitely always had the book, “How Babies Are Made” by Steven Schepp and Andrew Andry at our level, so we could read it once we were interested in the subject.
She did not have to coat anything and we found all the stories about babies growing in cabbage patches and being brought by a stork funny and amusing. They were great for cartoons and sitcoms.
That was good for us, however, others didn’t know about sex and being we didn’t know that my sister had Asperger’s, it could lead to very awkward moments. Some people only knew about “the birds and the bees.”
Being that the birds and the bees is such a common phrase, it would seem that there is a specific origin to the phrase, but it doesn’t seem that there is.
There are a few close times that it happens. In 1825, Samuel Taylor Colridge wrote a poem called Work Without Hope . It said, “All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair – / The bees are stirring – / birds are on the wing – / And Winter, slumbering in the open air, / Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! / And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, / Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.”
While this poem does talk about birds and bees, it doesn’t have any explicit reference to birds and bees having sex. Then, in 1875 the naturalist John Burroughs published a paper called Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and Other Papers . This doesn’t mention birds and bees having sex, either. It is meant to educate children about nature in a way that they can understand.
It is likely that the phrase “the birds and the bees” was common by 1928 because it is thought that Cole Porter referenced in his song, “Let’s Do It,” when it says, “And that’s why birds do it, bees do it / Even educated fleas do it / Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”
The first written reference to the phrase seems to be in November 1929 from the West Virginia newspaper The Charleston Gazette . It says, “You never talked about them or even recognized nice crooning little babies until they were already here. Even then the mothers pretended to be surprised. It [sex] was whispered about, but never mentioned in public. Curious and unafraid, we looked into sex and found it perfectly natural, in the flowers and the trees the birds and the bees.”
Source:
Martin, G. (n.d.). The birds and the bees. The meanings and origins of sayings and phrases . Retrieved January 4, 2011, from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-birds-and-the-bees.html
