he slept with WHAT?!

Ah, "the birds and the bees." It's something I've tried to explain in high school to rather mixed results (mostly Anita, Brooke, and Nicole edging away while laughing nervously).

As such, I shall attempt again to explain away the oftentimes baffling association of winged creatures with sexual intercourse.

First of all, there are some obvious correlations with real life. The English refer to young women as 'birds,' for instance. As further proof, in the song "Norwegian Wood," Lennon sings about this woman leading him on (and who he thinks he'll have sex with), but then in the morning 'that bird has flown.' Okay, so 'bird' = female. Fair enough.

Bees, then, are supposed to be the men. Why? Stingers. I'll leave it at that.

Furthermore, bees pollinate flowers - there is, of course, the popular saying that a woman losing her virginity has been 'de-flowered.' Again, fair enough.

But, at this point, things start to make less and less sense. To start, birds are always larger than bees. Does this imply that women are fat? If your father tells you about the 'birds and the bees,' is he really trying to say, 'Look at your mother - she's really been going at the fudge, in case you couldn't tell.'

Besides that, do bees even sting birds? A bee 'stinging' a bird is essentially condoning interspecies sex. While some people do have sex with non-human creatures, it's not a very acceptable lifestyle, and they probably aren't on the top of the invite list for Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of the family.

Also, bees generally only sting out of self-defense. To say that guys will only have sex with a girl out of self-defense, while an intriguing argument, is probably untrue.

It is possible that the saying is meant to be taken separately, saying instead that 'yes, both birds and bees have sex.' If that were true, then why don't people just substitute in 'people' for either 'birds' or 'bees'? If you're already talking about sex, it's not that much farther of a stretch at that point.

Instead, the person saying the line just comes off as having a weird fascination with animal sex. Not to say that's a bad fascination to have - those nature shows are quite interesting - but if a child is asking where babies come from, a parent probably should not start talking about a winged insect and a winged bipedal, vertebrate, egg-laying animal getting it on, whether with each other or with their respective species.

Probably just answer the question before the child develops a severely twisted sense of how intercourse works.