Here, LIFE.com celebrates the at-once humble and remarkable bee by transporting our readers back six decades, to a bustling bee market in the Netherlands. At the annual bee market at Veenendaal — “the biggest in Europe,” according to LIFE (August 1956) — beekeepers and prospective buyers of bees go through the ancient motions seen at markets the world over, for countless centuries: purchasers considering the wares, haggling over prices, considering the wares again … and eventually, a sale, with (relatively) happy faces all around.

As for the striking first image in this gallery, LIFE explained that beekeeper Gerrit Norssleman “wore the hood to protect his face and eyes from the swarms, had the pipe because its smoke calmed the bees and kept them at a safe distance. His hands, tougher than the sensitive area of his face, were bare so he could handle his bees dexterously without crushing them.”

If only the most dire peril facing bees today was the not-so-dexterous hands of their keepers! Something worth remembering the next time you bite into a peach, a strawberry, an apple, a pear — anything that grows with the quiet, restless, diligent help of the irreplaceable bee.

What is it about one personality or persona that draws our attention? That rivets us? And, perhaps even more to the point — especially in light of the picture above — is charisma a quality or a trait that one either has or doesn’t have, or is it something that one radiates by virtue of attaining a certain level of notoriety or fame? Would we bother looking at a picture of someone shaving in a men’s room in 1965, his head wrapped in a towel, if it wasn’t a picture of Frank Sinatra shaving in a men’s room in 1965, his head wrapped in a towel?

LIFE photographer John Dominis spent weeks with Sinatra in 1965 — the year the singer turned 50 — emerging with one of the most revealing photographic records of any major performer’s private world ever captured on film. From rehearsals in smoke-filled recording studios to Vegas nightclub performances to golf in the Nevada sun to playing with his dog Ringo in his home office to late-night hijinks with his drinking buddies, the Sinatra in Dominis’s remarkable photos is at-once far more approachable than the near-mythic bad boy of legend, and more Olympian in the way he dominates every scene. In large gatherings and small, in hotel suites and in sports arenas, virtually every frame Dominis shot makes it clear that, when Sinatra was around, no one else mattered.

[See the gallery, "LIFE With Sinatra: Portraits of ‘The Voice’ in 1965."]

Call it what you like — charisma, magnetism, star quality — there’s little question that by the time 1965 rolled around, Sinatra had “it,” and “it” made his every move, every gesture, no matter how commonplace or trivial, somehow significant. Or, if not significant, at least suggestive of something more. Power, perhaps.

[Buy the LIFE book, The Rat Pack: The Original Bad Boys.]

Ultimately, though, what makes a simple picture of Frank Sinatra shaving so weirdly engaging — especially when he’s obviously unconcerned with looking cool, or tough, or hip — is that such a picture feels so unexpected, so contrary to the way that, for the longest time, celebrities allowed themselves to be portrayed. Today, of course, when so many pop-culture creatures feel compelled to post, share and tweet every sordid or pointless experience (“Had another hangnail today!”) and every ill-formed thought in their heads, a picture of a half-naked singer peering in the mirror as he shaves would hardly raise any eyebrows.

Seeing a bona fide musical colossus unselfconsciously scraping away at his stubble, on the other hand, is so unusual that it somehow doesn’t even register as mildly intrusive. Instead, Dominis’s photograph is notable, all these years later, precisely because Sinatra is so supremely oblivious to our gaze. It’s not that we, the viewers, don’t matter; it’s just that, having done it all and seen it all in his long, prodigious career, the Chairman of the Board  has nothing left to prove.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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Many of Israel’s neighbors, meanwhile, as well as more than a score of other countries around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to North Korea, Somalia, Yemen and beyond, have never officially recognized Israel, while others that shared diplomatic relations have, at one time or another, suspended or broken ties completely over the years.

Thus, in the seven decades since its birth on May 14, 1948, Israel — a country roughly the size of New Hampshire — has arguably played a more salient (and divisive) role in international geopolitics than any other non-superpower on the planet. Surrounded by enemies, today and at the hour of its creation, Israel remains what it has to some degree always been — a kind of Rorschach state that assumes myriad shapes for myriad observers: aggressor, defender, usurper, bastion, homeland.

For example, far from being universally celebrated, the period when Israel won its independence — i.e., the era of civil war and of the war against neighboring Arab states after May 14, 1948 — is commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” And no wonder, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during, and long after, those wars of the late ’40s. In recent years, the contentious (to put it mildly) issue of Israeli settlements and continued Palestinian displacement on the West Bank has added fuel to what has always been a dangerous, smoldering fire.

In other words, for an awful lot of people around the Mideast and around the world, the intractable “Palestinian problem” might be better characterized as “the Israeli problem.”

In light of this fraught legacy — and the nature of the enmities that have, in large part, come to define the region — long-time Middle East watchers can perhaps be forgiven a certain pessimism when discussing the prospects for a lasting peace from the eastern Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea.

[MORE: See all of TIME.com's coverage of Israel.]

Here, however, through a series of pictures — most of which never ran in LIFE — by Frank Scherschel, LIFE.com looks back not at the Mideast’s thorny, enduring troubles, but at the immediate aftermath of Israel’s independence. A conflict photographer who made some of the most devastating images to emerge from the Second World War, Scherschel brought to his coverage of Israel’s birth a correspondent’s cool, clear eye, and a storyteller’s ability to find the smaller, quieter narratives amid the ruin and chaos of a war-battered landscape.

For its part, in an article published just weeks after Israel’s official independence — an article that featured some of the photos in this gallery — LIFE magazine acknowledged the ancient hopes of the Israelis at the dawn of their new nation, while presciently noting that nothing, nothing at all, was ever likely to come easy to the fledgling, embattled state:

In the deepening dusk on May 14, 1948 — which to them was the 24th day of the month of Iyar in the 5,708th year after creation — the Jews of Palestine gathered n their cities and villages to celebrate the most fateful moment in their history. The British mandate still had eight years to run, but already the last high commissioner, Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham, had retired to the cruiser Eurylas in Haifa harbor. There he sat watching the night creep across he eastern Mediterranean and the twilight envelop yet another fragment of old empire. He was too far offshore to hear the Jews chanting their ancient “Hatikvah” (Song of Hope), but he well knew the words: We have not forgotten, nor shall we forget, our solemn promise. …

In the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ended nearly 2,000 years of Jewish longing for a homeland with a great blow of his fist upon the speakers’ table. “The name of our sate shall be Israel,” he intoned, and a new nation was born.

Encouragement for the new state was not long in coming. Neither was trouble. Both the U.S. and Russia promptly recognized Israel and thus gave stature to the provisional government. When Dr. Chaim Weizmann was named first president — Weizmann at the time was in New York rallying support for his nation — he was invited to Washington for a 21-gun welcome.

But as these diplomatic bouquets were tossed, the embittered Arabs threw shells and bombs. From the ring of Arab states around Palestine the long-threatened attack had begun. King Abdullah of [the British protectorate of] Trans-Jordan sent his Arab Legion against Jerusalem and by week’s end had the Jewish defenders compressed into an ever-narrowing sector within the old walled city. Egypt’s planes repeatedly bombed Tel Aviv. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia pitched in — for whatever their scattered efforts might be worth. Israel was born indeed, but the Jews would need of the Shield of David to keep their nation alive.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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It might be too early, just four years later, to know whether Buffett’s confidence in the future of rail in America was fully warranted. But it’s hard not to feel that part of the reason so many people weighed in on the BNSF acquisition, and why it was scrutinized so closely, is because railroads — unlike the other huge industries (steel, oil, coal) that helped America become the premier industrial nation of the past 150 years — still have some romance about them.

Countless poems and popular songs have been written in praise of trains. How many have been written to celebrate, say, US Steel?

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of color photos of freight cars shot for Fortune in 1957 by the great Walker Evans — pictures that (like so much of Evans’s work) not only evoke a specific time, but capture something elemental about specific things. Evans was a master at finding the ideal way to present the physicality of a given object: a dilapidated house, a famous bridge, a roadside garage or, in the case of the pictures here, a freight car.

More often than not, Evans’s method of approaching his subjects could perhaps best be characterized as “head-on”; much of his greatest work, after all, is unadorned and unaffected. The transparency of his pictures, however, should never be mistaken for mere simplicity. It’s a very rare craftsman, after all, who can invest a portrait of banged-up, rusting, utilitarian machinery with a kind of muted grandeur.

Finally, aside from the wonderfully graphic nature of the pictures — the stark angularity of the cars themselves; the slashing contrast of sunlight and shadow; the faded (but still striking) colors that fill each frame — one is also confronted, again and again, with phrases and names that evoke another, earlier, perhaps inevitably idealized age. Missouri Pacific Lines (“Route of the Eagles”). Northern Pacific (“Main Street of the Northwest”). Grand Trunk Western. The Rock Island line, immortalized in a blues song dating back to the early 20th century. Seen through Evans’s particular, incomparable lens, these old freight cars — and the names of the rail lines on which they ran — are transformed into emblems of an American past that feels both familiar and fabled: a world of endless motion, frozen in time.

Here, in the very midst of tornado season, LIFE.com recalls a catastrophic tornado that slammed into Waco, Texas, 60 years ago this week. On the afternoon of May 11, 1953, an F5 tornado made a direct hit on Waco. (On the scale for rating rotational intensity created by storm researcher Ted Fujita, an F5 twister is capable of “incredible damage.) In a matter of minutes, in the face of cyclonic winds that likely topped 300 mph, hundreds of homes and businesses were utterly destroyed; thousands of cars were damaged or totaled; almost 600 people were injured and 114 were killed.

Today, six decades later, the 1953 Waco tornado remains tied with the 1902 Goliad twister for the grim distinction of Texas’s deadliest, and is the 11th deadliest in U.S. history.

In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, LIFE’s John Dominis and correspondent Scot Leavitt, who had just recently moved to Texas, made their way to the devastated city. All of the photos in this gallery, many of which never ran in LIFE, are Dominis’s; in a note sent to LIFE’s editors in New York, Leavitt noted that “through virtually all [of Dominis's] shooting, rain fell, the sky was dark and the mood was somber.”

For its part, LIFE wrote of the disaster in its May 25, 1953 issue:

By May 11 the warm, close weather was uncomfortably routine to the people of Waco, Texas. The day before had been muggy and the day before that, too. The big news in the Morning News-Tribune was of a tornado in far-off Minnesota. At mid-morning the New Orleans weather bureau warned there might be a few tornadoes close to home. But an Indian belief that tornadoes would never strike Waco had always held true and no one in the city worried about the report At 1:30 .m. the Waco weather forecaster announced, “No cause for alarm.”

Three hours later the skies suddenly darkened. people scurried for shelter from the hail and slashing rain, and at the edge of town a cemetery workman looked up to see a thick black wedge forming under a low cloud … At 4:37 p.m. the black wedge in the sky struck Fifth and Austin [streets], gouged the earth for a block and left the heart of Waco a broken coffin for scores of schoolboys, housewives, motorists….

Yet ballet is by no means immune to some forms of transformation: the forces that quietly mold other facets of modern culture have also marked the classical dance form. Renowned companies like the New York City Ballet avidly promote their repertoire on Facebook and Twitter. Artistic directors turn to psychedelic backdrop projections and costumes to bring balletic creations to life. And no longer is the “story ballet” — think Cinderella and Swan Lake — the go-to anchor for choreographers: thanks in large part to the great Russian-born 20th century choreographer George Balanchine, abstract, non-linear works have successfully embedded themselves in the culture’s idea of what ballet can be.

Dancers have changed, too, of course. “The technical training across cultures and facility that dancers have now is so much greater,” Princeton Lecturer in Dance and longtime member of the Mark Morris Dance Group Tina Fehlandt told LIFE.com. Higher expectations accompany the rigorous preparation: flexibility is boundless, and Odile’s thirty-two fouettés standard fare. Dancers are often strikingly thin — not exempt, it would seem, from societal assumptions about weight. And ballet, like so many practices built on aesthetics, is more than ever a province for the very young.

[MORE: See all of TIME.com's ballet coverage.]

“It’s important not to judge [Eisenstaedt's] photos and the dancers in them by the technical standards of today,” Fehlandt said. “I love looking at old photos for that very reason — you can compare and contrast.”

That is exactly what we can do with these photos from 1936: examine the directions in which ballet has evolved, and where it has stayed put. The pictures certainly reveal differences: the dancers are, for the most part, bare-legged (today most wear nylon tights) and their bodies are curvier that today’s ballet norm. But the routines and rituals are strikingly familiar, as is LIFE’s assertion that “ballet dancing is a hard, steady, painstaking job.” As art around the world — including ballet — seizes on new possibilities in multimedia, social media, advanced technology and new forms of collaboration, it’s nice to know that, at the most elemental level, some things really don’t change.

— Tara Thean is an undergraduate studying ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. Find her on Twitter, @TaraThean.

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“I have to finish up these captions,” Morse protested.

“This is more important,” the press officer said. Something in his manner told Morse that “important” might be an understatement. Dressed in his correspondents’ uniform, Morse grabbed his cameras and his raincoat and went down to the street in front of the hotel.

“There was a big black Cadillac there, and four or five Jeeps,” Morse recently told LIFE.com. “I’d be damned if I was going to let my cameras get soaked, so I jumped into the Caddy. We started off, and right away we all knew we were headed for Reims. You could just feel it.”

Reims, of course, was where SHAEF — the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force — was located for the last two years of the Second World War. Roughly 90 miles northeast of Paris, the town of Reims — and, specifically, the “little red schoolhouse” where Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and his staff were headquartered — was about to enter history as the exact spot where the war in Europe would come to an end. The long-rumored German surrender, coming hard on the heels of several leading Nazi figures’ suicides, including Hitler himself, was finally at hand. And Ralph Morse, who had covered so much of the war, from Guadalcanal to the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944, would have a front row seat.

But not quite yet.

“We got to the little red schoolhouse,” Morse recalls, “and learned that the Germans were coming to sign the surrender documents — in about ten minutes. We all started scrambling around, trying to get ourselves set up for the ceremony. But then it turned out there was some sort of mix-up, the Germans couldn’t sign that night after all, and the other correspondents and I were left there, waiting.

“I wasn’t going to leave that place until the Germans came back and signed,” Morse remembers. “I was terrified I’d step out for an hour, and miss the surrender! So I stayed there at headquarters for two solid days — I slept on the the floor, on my raincoat, and ate hamburgers for every meal — and I was still there when the German delegation, led by [Generaloberst Alfred] Jodl, finally arrived to sign the ‘instrument of surrender,’ as it was called, a few hours before dawn on May 7.”

Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

LIFE photographer Ralph Morse at Allied headquarters in Reims, France, seated in the chair used by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower when Ike announced Germany's unconditional surrender, May 7, 1945.

In the midst of the debate, meanwhile, one striking image is often invoked — that of the quasi-mystical “country doctor” who, in some vaguely perceived, misty past, made his (almost always emphatically his, and not her) way through all sorts of weather, at all times of day and night, to patients old and young, dispensing cures and even a kind of homey wisdom learned in a lifetime of caregiving.

That such a figure now belongs, almost exclusively, to our shared national memory (whether or not any of us actually ever met such a character) says a great deal about our desire and perhaps our need for just such a presence in our lives. The myth of the kindly, indefatigable, discreet, all-knowing general practitioner who made house calls, knew all of his patients’ medical histories and, in many cases, brought those patients into the world endures because, deep down, we sense that that is what we require — or, at the very least, that is what we all want, and no less than we deserve.

[MORE: See all of TIME.com's health coverage.]

The photograph above is not, in fact, of an American doctor, but there is something about the image that so perfectly suggests quiet, unhurried, hands-on care that it’s hard to believe, seeing it six decades later, that it’s not somehow staged. This, the picture seems to say, is how medicine is meant to be practiced: personally, with someone we’ve known and trusted all our lives.

The photo appeared in a March 1953 issue of LIFE, in a story about a French doctor who, although blind, maintained his practice for decades with the help of his wife, some nurses and, above all, the abiding trust of his patients. As LIFE wrote:

In 1931, after having served as a doctor for ten years in the village of Chelles, outside Paris, Albert-André Nast became blind and resigned himself to giving up his practice. But a patient came in for treatment and Dr. Nast found that even without eyesight he was able to diagnose the case. He decided not to quit. For 22 years [with help from nurses, his wife, Manon, and others] he has maintained the demanding routine of a country doctor, and the people of Chelles have never stopped trusting him.

Although he is a general practitioner, his first love is “Le Nativité,” the combined clinic and maternity home he created from a hunting lodge where he and his staff have delivered 4,000 babies.

There’s always a very real risk, of course, of romanticizing the past — especially when that past is as bloody, disease-ridden and generally awful as that experienced across so much of the globe. In countless ways, modern medicine is superior — and often less invasive and painful — than the treatments our parents, grandparents and their parents knew. Still, many of us pine for those days when a kindly (and unsentimental) doctor would show up with little more than his trusty, battered black bag, listen to our heart and lungs, ask a few questions, and make everything all right.

And if, for most of the planet and for most of human history, those days and that doctor never existed? Well … we can dream, can’t we?

[MORE: See W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Photo Essay, "Country Doctor."]

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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Despite the star power now enjoyed by the many, though, the idea of what a crowd looks like remains both fluid, and contradictory. Is a crowd a mob? An audience? A rally? A “sample population”? All of those things? None of those things? And more critically, when does a crowd cease to be a collection of individuals, and morph into something more (or something less)?

Photographer Lisa Larsen cut gently and firmly through all of those questions by somehow finding a way to make pictures of crowds that both captured the energy of multitudes (and smaller gatherings) while making sure that individual faces weren’t lost in the mix. This gallery features some of her very best crowd photos.

Larsen herself was a remarkable individual — a German-born prodigy, of sorts, she moved to the States with her family in the 1930s, graduated from college when she was just 17, and went on to photograph for publications as diverse as Glamour, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue and, of course, LIFE. When she died in 1959 at the age of 34, of breast cancer, LIFE eulogized Larsen this way:

Lisa Larsen liked people. And because, while being thoroughly professional, she was a very attractive person the people she photographed came to like her too…. In Russia in 1956, Khrushchev developed such admiration for her and her indefatigable work habits that he gave her a bouquet of peonies. Later she inspired an aside from Khrushchev during one of his cocky anti-Western speeches. “Don’t misunderstand me, ” he said, eying her in the audience. “There is an American girl standing in front of me. Americans are good people.”

Last week Lisa Larsen died. In 10 years with LIFE she had made a brilliant name for herself and won a shelf full of photographic awards. [Magazine Photographer of the Year in 1953 and '58; Overseas Press Club award for her work in Mongolia and in Poland; etc. — Ed.'s note] Her colleagues on LIFE — photographers, reporters, writers, editors — share the never-flagging interest she had in people. They will try to fill the gap, but they will sadly miss her vivacity and warmth.

Rodney Williams—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Photographer Lisa Larsen in New York City in 1949.

If any picture from the pre-World War II era captured the sheer malevolence animating the Reich’s ideology and actions, it was Eisenstaedt’s photo of Goebbels at the Carlton Hotel in Geneva.

Far less familiar to history buffs and photography aficionados, however, are some of the other pictures Eisenstaedt made on that September day eight decades ago. Long before he (like tens of thousands of other German and Austrian Jews) fled the Nazi threat in the mid-1930s, making their way to Switzerland, the Soviet Union, America and other more or less safe havens, Eisenstaedt was an accredited journalist, working throughout Europe. His presence at the League of Nations conference in 1933, therefore, was hardly an accident; like other correspondents, he was there to cover the news — and as a photographer, he was there to take pictures, which is exactly what he did.

Several of those pictures appear in this gallery — photos made just three years before LIFE magazine, with Eisenstaedt as one of the weekly’s first four staff photographers, launched in New York.

In the 1985 book, Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt: A Self-Portrait, the then-87-year-old photographer discussed how the Goebbels picture came about:

In 1933, I traveled to Lausanne and Geneva for the fifteenth session of the League of Nations.  There, sitting in the hotel garden, was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda.  He smiles, but not at me.  He was looking at someone to my left…. Suddenly he spotted me and I snapped him.  His expression changed.  Here are the eyes of hate. Was I an enemy?  Behind him is his private secretary, Walter Naumann, with the goatee, and Hitler’s interpreter, Dr. Paul Schmidt…. I have been asked how I felt photographing these men.  Naturally, not so good, but when I have a camera in my hand I know no fear.

At another point, Eisenstaedt noted that “this picture could be titled, ‘From Goebbels With Love.’ When I went up to him in the garden of the hotel, he looked at me with hateful eyes and waited for me to wither. But I didn’t wither.”

Goebbels himself, meanwhile, in his capacity as head of Nazi propaganda, and thus as the head of the Reich agency that controlled news outlets, literature, music, theater — in effect, every aspect of German culture — went on to spread his singular brand of bellicose, anti-Semitic lunacy for 12 more years after Eisenstaedt made his riveting portrait. A master of psychological manipulation and one of the earliest propagandists to recognize the enormous role that radio could play in controlling mass populations, Goebbels pushed the genocidal National Socialist agenda with the vehemence of a true believer.

When, in the spring of 1945, however, it became evident to even the most ardent Nazis that Germany was going to lose the war, Goebbels and his wife of 14 years, Magda (at right), chose to die at their own hands rather than surrender to advancing Red Army troops.

Accounts by survivors who saw the entire Goebbels family after they went into hiding beneath Berlin’s Reich Chancellory differ in some details about what happened on May 1, 1945. Not in dispute is that Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda ordered the murder of their own children — Helga, 12, Hildegard, 11, Helmut, 9, Holdine, 8, Hedwig, 6 and Heidrun, 4 years old, all given names starting with H in honor of Hitler — with morphine and then cyanide, after which they themselves committed suicide. (An SS doctor named Ludwig Stumpfegger likely administered the lethal cyanide doses to the six children after they had fallen asleep, or passed out, from morphine.)

Neither Goebbels nor his wife, it seems, was capable of envisioning a world without their Führer — Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide the day before — nor were they willing to consign their children to what, in their eyes, seemed an unimaginably bleak future. So they killed them. All eight bodies were discovered two days after the murder-suicides by Soviet troops; a quarter-century later, in April 1970, the KGB reportedly dug up the remains of Hitler, Eva Braun, the Goebbels and their children — they had been exhumed and reburied a number of times in the years after the war — burned them, and scattered the ashes in a tributary of the river Elbe.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

Magda Goebbels photo: Pix Inc.—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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