What This Topic Established

A bean is an object the container created and is managing — not any object a Spring class happens to reference.

BeanFactory is the root interface; ApplicationContext is what you actually depend on, and it adds eager singleton creation, events, internationalization and AOP proxying support on top.

A bean's life runs in a fixed order: instantiate, populate, initialize (@PostConstruct), ready, destroy (@PreDestroy) — the next topic is about getting the populate step right when more than one candidate could fill a dependency.