A Garden of Bees

Bees are deeply entrenched in the mythos of many cultures worldwide. As pollinators they are essential to all life, and as such are faithful servants of the Goddess, exemplified in individual colonies by dedication to their queen. They are icons of androgyny, and along with their delicious, healing, and preserving honey are symbolic of eroticism and sensuality, love, death, and immortality.

At the temple of Aphrodite at Eryx, priestesses were called "melissae", which means "bees," and Aphrodite herself was called Melissa, the queen bee. At the Ephesian temple of Artemis, the melissae were accompanied by transgendered priests called "essenes", meaning drones. Bees are classified as members of the hymenopteran order, meaning "veil-winged," recalling the hymen or veil that covered the inner shrine of the Goddess's temple, and the high priestess who bore the title of Hymen, presiding over marriage rituals and the Honey Moon. Pythagoreans worshipped bees as Aphrodite's sacred creature, who in their honeycombs create perfect hexagons; their endless symmetry seemed to suggest to them an underlying order in the cosmos. Demeter is also known as the mother bee, who governs the cycles of life. In ancient Greece, the dead were often embalmed in honey in large burial vases, crouched in the fetal position for their next birth. In the Yoruba religion, Oshun is the deity or orishá of rivers, lakes, and sensuality; she heals the sick with her magic honey.

There are countless references to the sacred and sensual nature of bees in literature. Some 500 years BCE the Greek poet Pindar writes: "But I am like the wax of sacred bees / like wax as the heat bites in: / I melt whenever I look at the fresh limbs of boys." In 1594, the poet Richard Barnfield has the shepherd Daphnis say to his beloved Ganymede, "O would to God... / My lips were honey, and thy mouth a bee... / Then shouldst thou suck my sweete and my faire flower / That now is ripe, and full of honey berries." Near the beginning of the twentieth century, Amy Lowell writes in her poem "A Decade," "When you came you were like red wine and honey, / and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness." More recently, the heroine in Starhawk's hopeful, though apocalyptic (and brilliant) novel "The Fifth Sacred Thing" discovers a Melissa and her melissae in the California coastal mountains who initiate her into their mysteries. And though Daniel Quinn makes no direct reference to bees in "The Story of B," it's easy to draw a parallel between the spread and meaning of B's extraordinary insights and the sacred work of honeybees. (See recommended reading for the latter two.)