what's the story behind "the birds and the bees"?

Question

i know it's a story people generally tell their kids who are too young to face the reality/truth about sex/where babies come frome, but i have never heard the story. Anyone know it? i'd love to hear it; just for laughs! plus you'll get a best answer too if you succeed in answering first, so it should be worth your time! thanks!

Answer 1

The phrase the birds and the bees (sometimes further extended to birds, bees and butterflies) has been common in the language for at least the last couple of centuries to refer in a generalised way to the natural world (do journalists still refer dismissively to the natural-history column in their journals as “the birds-and-bees department”?). The alliteration has undoubtedly helped to make it a satisfactory formulaic expression.

Fumbling attempts to explain the facts of life to children often involved analogies with birds laying eggs and bees pollinating flowers. So it’s easy to see how the expression could have turned into a sarcastic reference to such attempts.

It’s so common these days as to be a cliché. To round off this explanation, I wanted to include a note to say how old it is. This is where I got stuck. You might be astonished to discover how few reference books even mention this phrase; not one of my extensive collection of works on euphemisms and suchlike expressions includes it. Because it’s so common in its literal sense, finding euphemistic instances in digital archives involves combing through masses of irrelevant material.

If you know your song lyrics, you may have in mind that mildly risqué Cole Porter number from 1928, Let’s Do It, which has the lines “Birds do it, bees do it / Even educated fleas do it / Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”. That’s certainly got the idea. However, the first explicit use of the phrase I know of is in a newspaper, the Freeport Journal Standard, dated 1939: “A Frenchman was born sophisticated: he knows about the birds and the bees. In consequence, French films are made on a basis of artistic understanding that does not hamper the story.” I might be out by a decade or two, or even a century or two, though my impression is that it’s relatively modern.

-Michael Quinion

Answer 2

life, repoduction.