The Bee's Knees: Music With A Definite Buzz

First of all, we can't get around this one. It was originally written as an orchestral interlude for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

However, there have been versions for just about every instrument imaginable — including the tuba.

But I've discovered a new favorite: a woman named Annie Gong, playing it at the speed of light on the accordion.

You may remember that "Flight of the Bumblebee" was used as the theme music for the TV show (and, previous to that, the radio series) The Green Hornet, in a troubling show of disrespect for entomological accuracy. A hornet isn't a bee; it's a wasp. And hornets sometimes eat bees.

Speaking of wasps, there's a very well-known piece by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1909, he wrote very buzzy incidental music for Aristophanes' play The Wasps.

Here's a piece by a composer named Franz Schubert — no, not the Franz Schubert, but another composer by the same name who preferred to be called François Schubert. And it's the only piece of his that anybody knows.

There's nice, calm bee music, too, like a lovely song by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland called "It Was a Time When Silly Bees Could Speak."

There's also a 20th-century piece by the American composer John Duke, who set an Emily Dickinson poem called "Bee, I'm Expecting You." It's written from the viewpoint of a fly. It's very charming, but it has a bit of buzzing-bee personality in the piano part.

The 18th-century English composer Thomas Arne set one of Ariel's speeches from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." It's inspired perhaps by the charm of the bee and the flowers.