Euglossine Bee?

Why is my blog titled “Euglossine Bee?” What is a euglossine bee? Why is this blog called that?

The Euglossine bee is a spectacularly beautiful bee with an iridescent body. It collects scents from various orchids, blending them to make its own personal scent to impress its mate with, presumably, its creativity and breadth of selection, or maybe the effort involved. I started a blog to collect the bits and pieces of books that I wanted to recall (along with whatever else came to mind). It seemed to me that the Euglossine bee was a good metaphor for that blog, where I surround myself with talk of books and poems I didn’t write and even pictures I didn’t take (well, some of them.)

In a way, isn’t that a lot of what happens on Myspace and Facebook and on dating sites? I like these musicians, this song, these movies, books, foods… so you should like me. I’ve collected a list of books – I didn’t write them – I just read them, a list of favorite quotes that I didn’t invent…

By the way, if you are thinking, “How smells an orchid?” I answer this question for myself by thinking of that most famous orchid, vanilla.