"The talk," better known as "The birds and the bees", is a colloquial expression denoting a rite of passage in the lives of most children when parents explain human sexuality and sexual intercourse to them.^[1]

Meaning

According to tradition, "the birds and the bees" is a metaphorical story sometimes told to children in an attempt to explain the mechanics and results of sexual intercourse through reference to easily observed natural events. For instance, bees carry and deposit pollen into flowers, a visible and easy-to-explain parallel to fertilization. Female birds laying eggs is a similarly visible and easy-to-explain parallel to ovulation. Another interpretation of the bird laying the egg is childbirth, although that is not as common.

Possible origins

Word sleuths William and Mary Morris^[2] hint that it may have been inspired by words like these from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1825): "All nature seems at work ... The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing ... and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."^[3][4]

Dr. Emma Frances Angell Drake (b. 1849) wrote a section of a publication called The Story of Life which was published in 1909. This piece was later picked up and included in Safe Counsel, a product of the eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. The author tells her daughters, "When you discovered the tiny blue eggs in the robin's nest, and I told you that wrapped in each shell was a baby robin that was growing there, kept warm by the mamma bird..." The narrative continues on in vague terms without actually describing sexual intercourse. Later she describes the father's role in reproduction like this; "Sometimes it is the wind which blows the pollen dust from one plant to the other, and sometimes it is the bees gathering honey from the flowers. As they suck the honey from the blossoms some of the plant dust sticks to their legs and bodies, and as they go to another plant in search of sweets this is rubbed off and so the parts of the father and mother plant get together and the seed is made fertile." Safe Counsel was reprinted at least 40 times from 1893 through 1930 and may have been widely enough repeated to have contributed to the euphemism, "the birds and the bees."^[5]

Several sources give credit to Cole Porter for coining the phrase.^{[6][unreliable source?]} One of the musician's more famous songs was "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love." In Porter's publication from 1928, the opening line for the chorus carried derogatory racial terms like "Chinks" and "Japs", which were later changed, sometime between 1941 and 1954, to follow CBS's recommendation and NBC's adoption of the new "birds and bees" lyric:^[7]

And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love, let's make our love

In popular culture

• Jewel Akens earned one-hit wonder status with his Era Records single "The Birds and the Bees" in 1964, which reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song went on to hit the Top Ten in several European countries in 1965 and would later be covered by many other artists including Dean Martin and Brenda Lee.
• In the 1965 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show entitled "Go Tell the Birds and the Bees", Rob and Laura are forced to meet with the school psychologist when school officials catch wind of their son's version of the "Birds and the Bees".
• In The Family Plan (2023), Mark Wahlberg talks about the "birds and the bees" in the context of having to explain how his family ended up having three kids.