A busy hand, a busy mind

An old saying came to mind while I was working on the knee wall on my back porch yesterday.  You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.  My mind being what it is, I started analyzing the statement.  Why would you want to catch flies?  Why would you want to foul the honey?  And if the main goal is just to kill the flies, how does that work with the saying?
When I was a kid, my parents and I went to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, drove up the canyon road a ways and camped.  The next morning, my mom made pancakes for breakfast and at the end of the meal when we were sitting about talking and the bees started buzzing around us, my mom held out some syrup on her finger and a bee landed on it and ate the syrup.  We all laughed.  She went on about living in harmony with nature and stuff like that for a bit.  The bee came back several times to get more syrup.  Then it was time to clean up and travel on.  The bee wasn't convinced.  It got angry that the syrup was no longer being offered.  In the end, she had to kill the bee. 
There's got to be a moral in that story somewhere, but I have none to share.  Such were the wanderings of my mind while I finished laying brick and glass in the knee wall of my studio porch.