Telling the bees

The custom as recorded

When a beekeeper died, someone in the household would go to the hives and tell the bees, sometimes knocking, sometimes speaking a set form of words. The hives might be draped in black crepe or turned. In some accounts the bees were told of weddings and births as well, and in some they were given a portion of the funeral food.

The stated reason, where a reason is given, is that bees not told would leave, die, or fail to thrive. That is the logic of a household member who has to be informed of a household event — which is close to how the custom treats them.

Where and when it is documented

The bulk of the record is nineteenth-century folklore collection in Britain and Ireland, with parallels reported in France, Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe, and with transmission to parts of North America through emigration. Its documentary distribution is genuinely wide.

The poem problem

Whittier's poem 'Telling the Bees' did a great deal to fix the custom in the popular imagination, and much of what circulates today about ribbons, precise wordings and universal observance traces to literary treatments rather than to collected accounts. A poem is evidence that the custom was known and resonant; it is not evidence of how it was performed.

This is the ordinary shape of folklore transmission and it is worth naming, because the same process is at work in most of what people believe about traditional beekeeping: an attested practice, a literary version, and then the literary version repeated as the practice.

Is it still done

Occasionally, and self-consciously. It was reported at some hives after the death of Elizabeth II, and beekeepers do it as observance or as revival. That is not the same thing as a living folk custom transmitted without interruption, and HoneyHQ records the practice as historical with occasional revival rather than as current.