Bees in myth, religion and language

Recurring themes

Certain associations appear repeatedly in widely separated traditions, which is interesting but not evidence of a shared origin. Bees are conspicuous, useful, organised and dangerous, and honey is sweet, rare and does not spoil. Those facts are available to anyone, and they suggest similar metaphors independently.

• Divine messengers and intermediaries. Bees as travelling between worlds — between the living and the dead, or the human and the divine — appears in Greek, Celtic and several other traditions.
• Souls and the dead. Bees as departed souls, or as present at death. The northern European custom of 'telling the bees' when a household member died, sometimes with the hives put into mourning, was recorded into the twentieth century.
• Order, industry and the state. Bees as a model for human society, from Roman agricultural writers through medieval political metaphor to the beehive on civic emblems. Napoleon's bee, Manchester's worker bee, Utah's Deseret hive.
• Purity and incorruptibility. Honey's resistance to spoilage reads naturally as a metaphor, and beeswax candles were preferred for religious use in several traditions.
• Sweetness as knowledge or eloquence. The Greek image of the honeyed tongue; several traditions in which honey on the lips of a child or a poet confers speech.

Specific traditions

• Ancient Egypt. Honey in offering lists, in medical papyri and among grave goods. One tradition held that bees arose from the tears of the sun god Ra, and the bee appears in royal titulary.
• Greece. The infant Zeus fed on honey in the Cretan cave; the Melissae, priestess-bees at several sanctuaries including Delphi; and the Hymettus honey that was a byword for quality.
• Hinduism. Madhu, honey, appears throughout the Vedas. The Madhu-vidya, the honey doctrine of the Upanishads, uses honey as an image of the interdependence of all things.
• Islam. An entire chapter of the Qur'an is named An-Nahl, the Bee, and it describes honey as containing healing for people — a text with substantial continuing influence on how honey is regarded across the Islamic world.
• Judaism and Christianity. The land flowing with milk and honey; Samson's riddle; honey on Rosh Hashanah for a sweet year; beeswax candles on the altar.
• Maya. Ah Muzen Cab, a deity associated with bees and honey, within a stingless-beekeeping tradition entirely independent of the Old World.
• Celtic and Norse Europe. Mead as the drink of poets, kings and the gods — the Norse mead of poetry, and the central place of mead in Irish and Welsh legal and literary sources.

Bees in language

The metaphors have outlived the beliefs. 'Busy as a bee', 'the queen bee', 'a hive of activity', 'making a beeline', 'honeymoon', 'honeyed words', 'the birds and the bees'. English carries a dense layer of bee imagery, most of it centuries old, and most of it derived from close observation of colonies by people who depended on them.

A note on reading this material