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Maya the Bee: Prussian Military Origins

“Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you!”—De Vita Cæsarum “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.”—Marcus Aurelius “His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee’s experience Of clovers and of noon!”     —Emily Dickinson, The Bee In 1912, Austrian children’s writer Waldemar Bonsels wrote what would be a classic book that would endure for over a century.  It was a short book titled Die Biene Maja, or in English, Maya the Bee.  Maya has been translated out of German and into many languages since, and has been adapted to a feature film twice (in 1924 and again in 2014), and twice to television, as well (first in a 1975 Japanese production, a second Japanese production in 1979, and then in a 2012 French production).  The 1975 cartoon was introduced to the United States in 1990 by the American-Israeli television production company Saban, using an all-Canadian cast of voice actors to dub the show.  (An earlier dubbed version