The Bee in Folklore & Mythology

(Originally written for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust)

The bee features as much in folklore from around the world as it does in our gardens in summer time. Yet, in this article, I can only scratch the surface of this vast body of information. Bees show up in human art forms almost as soon as mankind learned to create them; they are depicted in ancient rock art from around the world, for example from the Palaeolithic in Spain and from the Mesolithic in India and are mentioned in some of the earliest forms of writing in the world. Bees crop up everywhere from poetry to prose and even in our everyday sayings: we can be as 'busy as a bee', we 'make a bee-line' for things, we can get 'a bee in the bonnet' and the term 'bee's knees' now famously refers to something fabulous, although originally it referred to something small and insignificant.

Bees are linked with magic, love, industriousness and creativity. The mere presence of bees on a farm or near a dairy or factory was said to improve the productivity. Bees create honey, create noise, pollinate, and the Queen Bee who births her subordinate bees, is the epitome of creation itself. And, if you think the use of the term 'honey' in terms of love is something from the age of pop songs, think again, the Sumerians and Egyptians were doing it in poetry around four thousand years ago!  Bees have also been used as a kind of love test: there was a custom in Central Europe of Brides to be walking their partner past a beehive or nest to test the future faithfulness of their husband to be - if they were stung it was curtains for the marriage idea...

To the Vikings mead, made from honey, was one of the main ingredients, along with the blood of Kvasir, of the Mead of Poetry, a magical brew that could give the gifts of wisdom and poetry and immortality to anyone who drank it. In many parts of the world bees are considered to be able to grant the gifts of poetry, eloquence and song to mankind. To the Greeks they were the 'birds of the muses'. Widespread throughout the British Isles is the belief that bees buzz or hum a special hymn at midnight on Christmas Eve (1) and in the Irish poem, King & The Hermit, dated to the seventh century, bees are 'the little musicians of the world'. Bees are also credited with understanding many languages.

In Ancient Egypt, the bee, in particular the honeybee, was one of several royal symbols, and was used consistently for over four thousand years. The bee represented the Pharaoh's sovereignty over Lower Egypt and the Pharaoh was often referred to as 'He (or She) of the Sedge and Bee'(2). To the Ancient Egyptians, the Pharaoh was a God King, and this association between Bees and Deities seems to be as old as religion itself. Bees were supposedly born from the tears of the Sun God, Ra. The Temple of Neith, The Goddess of the Night, was known as 'The House of the Bee'(3) and the sanctuary of Osiris, God of the Underworld and Death, was The 'Mansion of the Bee'(4). In times past many people were convinced that the Queen bee was in fact a King. If a swarm of bees settled on a person it was believed they would attain leadership or even kingship. In Poland, Michel Wiscionsky was chosen as King because bees landed on him during the election.

In Ancient Greece the priestesses who attended the Goddess Demeter were known as Melissae meaning 'bees'(5). This name of Melissae for priestesses is also used by several modern Goddess groups to honour bees and their Goddess as their 'Queen Bee'. The original Melissa was a Greek Nymph who came to care for the infant Zeus, shielding from his father Cronus who intended to eat every one of his offspring. As punishment for protecting Zeus, Cronos turned Melissa into an earthworm; later the adult Zeus took pity on her and changed her into a bee. The Ancients had several Bee Gods and Goddesses, such as the Lithuanian Bee Goddess Austeja and her husband the Bee God Babilos, the Roman Goddess Mellonia and the Slavic God Zosim; bees were also associated with other Deities such as Artemis, Aphrodite, Brighid, Rhea, and Vishnu.

Bees of all kinds were thought to have special knowledge and the ability to tell or see into the future. In Greek mythology the God Apollo was taught how to see into the future by the Thriae: the three pre-Hellenic Bee Goddesses, Melaina, Kleodora and Daphnis(6).

According to folklore from Britain and Ireland, if a bumblebee buzzes around your house or at your window, it brings news that a visitor will soon arrive (7), and the bumblebee is even supposed to tell you the visitor's gender; if it has a red tail (like the Early Bumblebee or Red-tailed Bumblebee) the visitor will be male, if the tale is white (as with the White-Tailed Bumblebee, Heath Bumblebee or Garden Bumblebee), the visitor will be female. However if anyone killed the visiting bumblebee, the visitor would bring nothing but bad news (which serves them right)! 

Bees symbolise wealth, the wealth of  knowledge or the wealth of good luck as well as meaning wealth in the financial sense. In Wales it was very lucky if bees of any kind set up home in or near your home, as they were said to bless it with prosperity. Finding a bumblebee on a ship is good luck. Should a bee land in your hand then it allegedly means that money is coming your way. According to Irish and British folklore, you must never buy bees with normal money, only with gold coins (8), although, if possible, it is best to barter over them, so as not to offend them, or to receive them as a gift, so that no money changes hands at all. If a single bee enters your house it is traditionally a sign of good luck coming to you, usually in the form of money(8), but to have a bumblebee die in your home brought bad luck and poverty.

Even in modern folk magic bumblebees serve as a as a charm for health and wealth. Bee stings were said to treat the pain of rheumatism and arthritis (something modern science is investigating), and honey has been used in folk magic to treat just about any and every ailment mankind has ever been known to suffer with. The Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle retails a charm, promising health, happiness and good fortune that features three ceramic bumblebees in a blue pouch(9) - this is a vast improvement on the old folk charm it is based on, found in Dawlish, that sadly featured three dead bumblebees in the bag. Bees have long been associated with witches and witchcraft: one Lincolnshire witch was said to have a bumblebee as her familiar animal(10), another witch from Scotland allegedly poisoned a child in the form of a bee, and in Nova Scotia a male witch was accused of killing a cow by sending a white bumblebee to land on it(11).

Omens have been read in the flight of bees, as well as the flight of birds, for centuries.  When bees swarm it is usually considered an ill omen. If bees swarmed onto a dead or rotten tree, it was said to portend the death of one of the family who owned or lived near the tree. When bees become lethargic it augurs misfortune and if they are busy buzzing away then they augur good fortune. Many ancient writers, like Aristotle and Pliny, considered bees to be able to predict the weather. There are many traditional rhymes in German, French and English that describe how they allegedly do this. A traditional rhyme tells us :

'When bees to distance wing their flight
Days are warm and skies are bright
But when their flight ends near their home
Stormy weather is sure to come.'

Another rhyme, probably the best known of all, tells us :
'A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.'

If a bee buzzes over a sleeping child in its cot it is said to portend that the child will live a long, happy, healthy and prosperous life and if the bee touched the child's lips it would be a great poet according to Greek folklore. If a bee lands on your head, folklore suggests that you will be successful in all your endeavours! There is an odd belief that virgins can pass through a swarm of bees without being stung(12) and if bees nested in the eaves of a house it was said that the daughters of the house would never marry.

Bee dreams have a myriad of meanings depending on what the bees in your dream are doing. If they swarm, it suggests that you will be overwhelmed or experience bad luck. To dream of being stung is to be betrayed by someone you know. However if you dream of bees happily buzzing, then the dream augurs good fortune for the day ahead.

Like butterflies, bees are symbols of the soul and its ability to pass or fly between worlds in Egyptian, Greek and Celtic mythology. In one Ancient Egyptian ritual in The Book of Am-Tuat, the voice of the soul is compared to the humming buzz of bees and in another ritual, Kher-Heb, the soul is referred to as 'going about as a bee, though seeest all the goings about'(9). There are also stories, especially from Germany, where the souls of the sleeping, leave their bodies in the form of the bee that flies from the mouth, and should the bee be trapped or waylaid, then the soul is unable to return to the body. Bees also offered protection for the soul. In the Ancient Egyptian ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth (where the soul was released from the body) there is the line 'The bees, giving him protection, they make him to exist'(9).

Bees are also linked with fairies, partly due to their winged nature, but also thanks to the 16th century Italian poem, Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, which features a good fairy with the very apt name of Melissa.  From the Isle of Man comes the tale of a group of fairies who, as they flew about, made a noise similar to that of a buzzing bee. Bees, like fairies, are often considered guardians of the natural world, because of their vital role in the pollination of many plants.  

Speaking to a bee, either a honeybee or bumblebee, harshly was thought to drive it away, as was swearing (8). Bees had to be spoken to in very specific ways. 'Telling the Bees' is an old English folk custom where honeybees are treated like members of the family and kept up to date with all the goings on. Many of us are familiar with the tradition of telling the bees when someone in the family, especially the bee's primary keeper dies, but traditionally all family news, including births, marriages, etc., and even news about visitors, was told to the bees as a courtesy. There is a caveat to this, you had to be careful who told the bees what; for example only the Bride should tell the bees of an upcoming wedding and not anyone else, no matter how well intentioned they were. It was believed that failure to tell the bees of important news would result in them flying away, dying or stopping honey production. In both Britain and America, honeybees were even invited to Weddings (13) and Funerals (14), and it they didn't make it, then food and drink from the wake, or a piece of Bridal cake was left by the hive. 

This idea of telling the bees goes much deeper than news of births, marriages and deaths. It harks back to the idea that bees are messengers to the divine or to other realms. In many parts of Britain Bees are known as ‘The Little Servants of God’ or ‘The Small Messengers of God’ and this idea of bees as messengers dates back to Greek mythology where a Dryad once sent a message of love to Rhoecus. In Welsh folklore, bees, like man, were considered the only creatures to have come from Paradise and were seen as especially beloved by God.

People have long shared their lives with bees and talked with the bees, perhaps in the hope that the bees will pass their concerns on to a higher power or take their worries away, or perhaps it is just that in talking to the buzzing bees one cannot help but be cheered up by them...

Sources:
(1) Ransome, H. (1986). The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. New York: Dover. Page 229.
(2) Allen, James P. (1999). Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. New York: Cambridge University Press.
(3) Lesko, B.S. (1999). The Great Goddesses of Egypt. University of Oklahoma Press. Page 48.
(4) Lichtheim, M. (2006). Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume III: The Late Period. Los Angeles: California University Press. Page 121.
(5) Gimbutas, M. (1974). The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 7000 to 3500 BC Myths, Legends and Cult Images. London: Thames & Hudson. Page 182.
(6) Pausanias. (2012). Pausanias's Description of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Page 239.
(7) Newell, V. (1971). Discovering the folklore of birds and beasts. Oxford: Shire Publications. Page 15.
(8) Simpson, J. & Roud, S. (2000). A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(9) http://www.museumofwitchcraft.com/
(10) Ransome, H. (1986). The Sacred Beein Ancient Times and Folklore. New York: Dover. Pages 224-5.
(11) Creighton, H. (1968).  Bluenose Magic: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Nova Scotia. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Press.
(12) Hole, C. (1945). English Folklore. London: B. T. Batsford.
(13) Horn, T.  (2006). Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Page 137.
(14) Dundee Courier. January 23, 1950.