Bees in mythology
Gold plaques embossed with winged bee goddesses. Camiros, Rhodes. 7th century BC.
Homer's Hymn to Hermes describes three bee-maidens with the power of divination and thus speaking truth, and identifies the food of the gods as honey. Sources associated the bee maidens with Apollo and, until the 1980s, scholars followed Gottfried Hermann (1806) in incorrectly identifying the bee-maidens with the Thriae.[115] Honey, according to a Greek myth, was discovered by a nymph called Melissa ("Bee"); and honey was offered to the Greek gods from Mycenean times. Bees were also associated with the Delphic oracle and the prophetess was sometimes called a bee.[116]
The image of a community of honey bees has been used from ancient to modern times, in Aristotle and Plato; in Virgil and Seneca; in Erasmus and Shakespeare; Tolstoy, and by political and social theorists such as Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx as a model for human society.[117] In English folklore, bees would be told of important events in the household, in a custom known as "Telling the bees".[118] Honey bees, signifying immortality and resurrection, were royal heraldic emblems of the Merovingians, revived by Napoleon.[119]
In art and literature
Beatrix Potter's illustration of Babbity Bumble in The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, 1910
Some of the oldest examples of bees in art are rock paintings in Spain which have been dated to 15,000 BC.[120]
W. B. Yeats's poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888) contains the couplet "Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, / And live alone in the bee loud glade." At the time he was living in Bedford Park in the West of London.[121] Beatrix Potter's illustrated book The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse (1910) features Babbity Bumble and her brood (pictured).[122] Kit Williams' treasure hunt book The Bee on the Comb (1984) uses bees and beekeeping as part of its story and puzzle.[123] Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees (2004), and the 2009 film starring Dakota Fanning, tells the story of a girl who escapes her abusive home and finds her way to live with a family of beekeepers, the Boatwrights.[124]
Bees have appeared in films such as Jerry Seinfeld's animated Bee Movie,[125] or Eugene Schlusser's A Sting in the Tale (2014). The playwright Laline Paull's fantasy The Bees (2015) tells the tale of a hive bee named Flora 717 from hatching onwards.[126][127]
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