Ritual and ceremony
Observances attached to the bees or to the harvest. Recorded as documented practice with a date and a source, never as a general spiritual claim.
9 practices · type of practice
- BalchéRitual and ceremony · Local living practiceA fermented drink of stingless bee honey and the bark of the balché tree, used ceremonially in the Maya lowlands. Suppressed under colonial rule, documented across several centuries, and still made.
- Telling the beesRitual and ceremony · HistoricalThe custom of informing a household's bees of a death, a birth or a marriage, and in some versions draping the hive in black or inviting the colony to the funeral. Recorded widely across northern Europe and the eastern United States in the nineteenth century.
- Honey in Hindu ritualRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceHoney in the reception of an honoured guest, in the five-nectar offering, and poured over images in temple ritual — a living practice with an unusually deep and continuous textual record.
- Honey in Jewish practiceRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceApple dipped in honey at the new year, honey and the sweetness of learning, and the questions of law that arise when honey is made by an insect that may not be eaten.
- Beeswax in Christian liturgyRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceThe requirement that liturgical candles be made of beeswax, the Easter proclamation that praises the bees who made it, and the enormous demand that requirement placed on medieval beekeeping.
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney as a temple offering in a state that ran its own apiaries, the bee as a royal symbol, and the solar origin myth that is quoted far more confidently than its source supports.
- Honey offerings in Greek religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney poured to the dead and to the powers below, honey cakes as offerings, and the priestesses and prophetic figures Greek writers associated with bees.
- Maya ceremonies for the beesRitual and ceremony · Current status unknownCeremonies performed for the increase and wellbeing of stingless-bee colonies in Yucatán, recorded in colonial description and in twentieth-century ethnography, and part of a religious complex built around a managed insect.
- Wax votives and figuresRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceWax objects left at shrines — limbs, bodies, animals, whole figures — offered for healing or in thanks. A devotional practice that consumed wax in quantity and is still carried on.