Telling the bees

What was done

On a death in the household, somebody — often a child, often the new head of the family — would go to the hives, knock or speak, and tell the bees who had died. Recorded variants include draping the hive with black crepe, turning the hive around as the coffin left, and leaving funeral food and drink at the entrance.

The stated consequence of failing to do it was that the bees would die, leave, or stop producing. Births and marriages were also announced in some accounts, and a hive might be given a piece of wedding cake.

Where and when it is documented

Well documented in nineteenth-century folklore collections across England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, France and the north-eastern United States, and it appears in nineteenth-century poetry, which is a large part of why it is remembered.

Why bees and not other livestock

Nobody told the pigs. The custom singles out bees, and the usual explanation is that a colony was understood as a member of the household rather than as stock: it was not bought and sold in the ordinary way, in several traditions selling bees for money was avoided or thought unlucky, and a colony that left or died was read as a judgement on the household.

That fits a wider pattern in European bee folklore, in which bees are moralised as industrious, chaste and orderly, and are held to object to swearing, quarrelling and mourning left unannounced. The custom is one piece of a larger set of ideas rather than an isolated superstition.