HONEY IN MYTH AND LEGEND.. Myths and legends about honey bees are widespread throughout the world, and to some extent they still colour the way we view the golden liquid and the insects which produce it.

it was believed that bees would thrive only in harmonious families, and they were supposed to be included in family happenings. They were considered to be models of domestic peace and harmony and were also highly industrious workers, attributes to which most households aspired. "Telling the Bees" was vitally important, whether it was good or bad news or simply everyday happenings. bees had to be told of a death in the family or they would die too. The bad news had to be given before sunrise on the following day for all to be well.

Sometimes a piece of funeral cake and a drink of wine was left by the hive after a funeral. The bees might also be formally invited to the funeral, or the beehives turned round as the coffin was carried out of the house past them.

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Why Bees Have Stingers - Long ago bees could not protect themselves or their precious honey. The bees ask Wesakechak for help. After four days of thinking, Wesakechak gives them a gift. He tells them by working together, using his gift, even Muskwa the bear will not be able to steal their honey.



The feast of the One-victors, far from a drunken orgy -- unless it be in the sense of the original Dionvsian Mysteries, when wine represented spiritual illumination -- is a partaking of universal elements. These are symbolized by the honeyed mead or nectar of the gods, as in the Greek myths (honey is gathered through the selfless efforts of bees for the common good. In the Greek Mysteries, the mystae, initiants, were called melissae bees

Lastly the bee, the one insect that is tamable and will live among men, and whose wise ways are such a lesson to them, may be expected to have old mythic associations. The bee is believed to have survived from the golden age, from the lost paradise nowhere is her worth and purity more prettily expressed than in the Servian lay of the rich Gavan, where God selects three holy angels to prove mankind, and bids them descend from heaven to earth, 'as the bee upon the flower, The clear sweet honey, which bees suck out of every blossom, is a chief ingredient of the drink divine it is the ndeia edwdh of the gods, Hymn. in Merc and holy honey the first food that touches the lips of a new-born child, . Then, as the gift of poesy is closely connected with Oðhrœris dreckr, it is bees that bring it to sleeping Pindar egeneto And therefore they are called Musarum volucres A kindermärchen ( speaks of the queen-bee settling on her favourite's mouth; if she flies to any one in his sleep, he is accounted a child of fortune.

It seems natural, in connexion with these bustling winged creatures, to think of the silent race of elves and dwarfs, which like them obey a queen. It was in the decaying flesh of the first giant that dwarfs bred as maggots; in exactly the same way bees are said to have sprung from the putrefaction of a bullock's body: To this circumstance some have ascribed the resemblance between apis bee and Apis bull, though the first has a short a, and the last a long. What seems more important for us is the celebrated discovery of a golden bullock's-head amongst many hundred golden bees in the tomb of the Frankish king Childeric at Doornik

Natural history informs us that clouds of bees fall upon the sweet juice of the ash-tree; and from the life-tree Yggdrasil the Edda makes a dew trickle, which is called a 'fall of honey,' and nourishes bees The Yngl. says of Yngvifrey's son, king Fiölnir that he fell into a barrel of mead and was drowned; so in Saxo, king Hunding falls into sweet mead, and the Greek myth lets Glaucus drown in a honey-jar, the bright in the sweet.

According to a legend of the Swiss Alps, in the golden age when the brooks and lakes were filled with milk, a shepherd was upset in his boat and drowned; his body, long sought for, turned up at last in the foaming cream, when they were churning, and was buried in a cavity which bees had constructed of honeycombs as large as town-gates ( de Bees weave a temple of wax and feathers . and in our Kinderm. a palace of wax and honey. (he lies in the minister he built, as the bee her web from many a blossom works, that we name honey-juice).



In the various languages the working bee is represented as female, OHG. pîa, Lat. apis, Gr. melissa, Lith. bitte, in contrast with the masc. fucus the drone, OHG. treno, Lith. tranas; but then the head of the bees is made a king, our weiser (pointer), MHG. wîsel, OHG. wîso, dux, Pliny's 'rex apium,' Lith. bittinis, M. Lat. chosdrus ( yet AS. beomôdor, Boh. matka. The Gr. esshn is said to have meant originally the king-bee, and to have acquired afterwards the sense of king or priest, as megissa also signified priestess, especially of Demeter and Artemis. Even gods and goddesses themselves are represented by the sacred animal, Zeus (Aristaeus) as a bee, Vishnu as a blue bee. A Roman Mellona or Mellonia ( was goddess of bees; the Lith. Austheia was the same, jointly with a bee-god Bybylus. Masculine too was the Lett. Uhsinsh, hosed one, in reference to bees' legs being covered with wax ('waxen thighs,'