Were bees associated with souls and the afterlife?

Where it is documented

• Greek and Roman writers associating bees with souls and with the underworld.
• Honey libations poured to the dead across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
• Northern European folk custom treating the hive as a household member that must be told of a death.
• Swarms in the wrong place read as omens of a coming death, in the same European record.
• Bees as ancestral messengers in ethnographic accounts attached to specific named communities.

Why the recurrence, and why not more than that

A swarm leaving a hive looks like something departing a body. A colony that survives winter looks like continuity through death. Those are available observations anywhere bees are kept, and they explain the pattern without requiring any contact between the traditions — which is fortunate, because the evidence for contact does not exist.