Bees and honey in mythology

Reading this as literature

Everything on this page is a story somebody wrote down. That is not a disparagement — myth is evidence of the first rank about how a culture thought — but it is a different kind of evidence from an excavated hive or a tax record, and the two get blended constantly in writing about bees.

The specific hazard here is compression. Greek myth was never a single system; it varied by city, by period and by author, and much of what circulates as 'the Greek myth' about bees comes from Hellenistic or Roman authors writing centuries after the archaic material they drew on.

The infant Zeus and the nurse called Melissa

The best-known bee myth is that the infant Zeus, hidden in a Cretan cave, was fed on honey. In the versions that survive, nymphs care for him — the goat Amaltheia supplying milk, bees or a nymph named Melissa supplying honey. Melissa is simply the Greek word for bee, which is part of why the figure is slippery: it is a name and a noun at once.

Honey and prophetic speech

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes describes three prophetic female figures who are fed on honeycomb and speak truth when they have eaten it. They are conventionally identified with the Thriae. Both the identification and the details of the passage are debated by scholars, and it is cited here for what it securely shows: an early Greek link between honey and inspired speech.

That association recurs. Honey turns up alongside eloquence and poetry in Greek material, and it does so again, quite independently, in Norse literature — where the mead of poetry confers the same gift by being drunk rather than eaten. Two unconnected traditions linking a sweet fermentable substance with inspired speech is a convergence worth noting and not evidence of contact.

Aristaeus, and bees from a carcass

Virgil's fourth Georgic gives the fullest treatment: Aristaeus, a keeper of bees, loses his colonies as punishment after pursuing Eurydice, and is instructed to sacrifice cattle, from whose carcasses new swarms arise. The Orpheus and Eurydice story is embedded inside it, and the poem is doing philosophical and political work rather than agricultural reporting.

The bugonia belief — that bees generate spontaneously from a dead ox — was taken seriously in ancient agricultural writing as well as in poetry. It is false. The likely observational basis is the drone fly, whose adults resemble honey bees closely and whose larvae genuinely do develop in decaying matter. It is a good example of a wrong conclusion built on a real observation.

What the recurrence does and does not show

Bees and honey turn up in the mythologies of societies with no contact: as divine food, as souls, as messengers, as omens, as the origin of poetry. It is tempting to read that as a shared inheritance. The better explanation is that a small insect which produces a sweet, keeping, valuable substance out of flowers, lives in an ordered community, and can hurt you is going to attract stories wherever people meet it.

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.