Meaning
A euphemism for sex and human reproduction, especially the vague, embarrassed explanation of where babies come from that adults traditionally give children. Bees carrying pollen to flowers and birds laying eggs stand in for fertilization and birth, letting a speaker gesture at the facts of life without naming them; the phrase is now the standard shorthand for parental sex education and 'the talk'. Almost always with the definite article and singular agreement. Typically paired with explain, talk about, or the noun phrase the talk. The Porter-coined-it and Burroughs-coined-it stories are debunked; the coiner remains unknown. Regional use: American English origin; now common in British and Commonwealth English.
Origin
The coiner is unknown, and the popular origin stories do not hold up. The imagery is old - Coleridge's 1825 poem Work Without Hope pairs 'The bees are stirring - birds are on the wing', and the naturalist John Burroughs titled an 1875 nature-essay collection Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and other Papers - but Burroughs's essays contain no sex education, so the claim that he coined the euphemism misreads a precursor. Cole Porter's 1928 list song 'Let's Do It' ('birds do it, bees do it') is often credited, but the song alludes to the idea rather than using the fixed phrase; commentators read it as evidence the expression was already common currency by 1928, not that Porter coined it. The earliest documented euphemistic print uses run from November 1929 (the Charleston Gazette, on sex as natural 'in the flowers and the trees the birds and the bees') to 16 January 1936, when the Wisconsin State Journal quoted the psychiatrist Temple Burling advising parents not to put a child off 'with vagaries about the birds and the bees' - verified verbatim on Word Histories.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- birds and bees
- the birds and the bees and the flowers
Usage Examples
- When Amy turned ten, her mother decided it was time to explain the birds and the bees.
- The school nurse gives the birds and the bees talk to the fifth graders every spring.
- He was so sheltered that at nineteen he still had not heard about the birds and the bees.