What did Slavic and Baltic cultures believe about bees?

Beekeeping as kinship

Across the Baltic and in Slavic ethnography, keeping bees jointly or sharing a tree established a formal bond comparable to godparenthood — with obligations, forms of address and expectations of mutual help. It is an institution, not a belief about bees.

The strongest evidence for how widespread it was is linguistic. Lithuanian bičiulystė, built on the word for bee, now means close friendship in ordinary speech. A term that migrates from a specific relationship to a general one implies the specific relationship was common enough to supply the metaphor.

The rest of the record

A prohibition on selling bees for money, saints adopted as patrons of beekeeping, wax rendered to churches as obligation, and bees appearing in funerary and seasonal custom. All of it sits inside a forest-beekeeping economy in which bees were kept in living trees under systems of tenure, so the social bond was also a property relationship.