Bee Stories for Gobnait’s Day - part 2
From Mother Bee to Mother Goddess
Mother Goddess images manifesting from the life of a Queen Bee, I love to indulge in with wonder for this very interesting speculation.
Bees are a true matriarchal society. The Queen Bee is the mother of all bees in the hive. Her power is absolute and she can be fierce.
A Queen Bee grows in a pouch while worker and drone Bees grow in six sided honeycomb cells. The Queen Bee grows in 16 days while the rest of the bees take about 21 days.
While growing and as an adult the Queen is fed "royal jelly", a high protein substance produced from the heads of Worker Bees.
The Queen Bee, in the hive, fights to be the sole queen, the sole mate to all male drone bees present and will aim to kill all female queen competitors in her way. To do this, unlike all other bees, she can sting repeatedly without dying herself..
I am surprised that the life of the Queen Bee has not manifested itself into mythology and folklore stories of Brighid, that I am aware of.
The Queen Be mythology certainly fits close to the stories of lusty Queen Maeve of Connaught. Maeve, the lusty queen taking on the attention of many male pursuers and disposing of them too.
Maeve the queen who sent many men out on quests including the fetching of the Brown Bull of Cooley, another link in mythology connecting the symbolism of Bulls and Bees.
More About Sacred Bees in ancient Egypt
Egyptians seem to weave together fragments of myths, folklore, and traditions from the ways of many tribes, before them, to form templates of living for their own culture. The Greeks and Romans certainly did did similar later. The Romans remind me of the Star Trek Borg, “you will be assimilated …”. Every time Romans overcame tribes and their culture the integrated those cultures into their own collective, just like the fictional Star Trek Borg did.
The modern Celts enthusiasts, Australia’s aborigine tribes, and even Pagan and Druid groups are attempting to do similar today.
One of the pools of myths and traditions included in all of the synthesis of myths, folklore and traditions are the veneration of Bees.
Over thousands of years, Egyptian farmers increasingly perfected the organized craft of Beekeeping. Their medicine men, as thet tend to be men rather than women as ancient Egypt was very patriarchal, developed very sophisticated apiculture.
Beekeeping was very important in Egypt, especially from around 4000 BC until 2000 BC, especially in the Egyptian Delta. Beeswax was an essential ingredient in the creation of effigies used in rituals, so crafting with beeswax was an important trade to learn for status in Ancient Egypt.
King Menes, founder of the First Egyptian Dynasty, was given a title that translates as "the Beekeeper", a title passed on to all Pharaohs that followed. Also the Pharoah's administration had an "office" called 'Sealer of the Honey', but I am not sure what that role was.
The Dance of the Bee Goddess
Bees are the only insect, I know of, that communicates through dance. When bees find a new food source, that is too far away to be smelled or seen, they go back to the hive and theydance.
Their dance tells the other bees both the direction and how far away the food source is. The Bee Dance is complex and seemingly too inspired to be a life feature that evolved.
The scout bee dances on the honeycomb in the hive. The other bees then follows the dancer and imitate her movements precicly. Yes, all worker bees are female. The bees also take in and memorize the fragrance of the pollen in the nectar carried into the hive by the scout bee.
If the food source is within about 50 meters of the hive, the scout bee does a circular dance on the honeycomb.
If the food source is further away the scout bee does a figure of eight dance, known as a "waggle dance".
The direction and angle the dancing bee cuts across the diameter of the circle also reveals the direction of the food.
In ancient times, especially through the Age of Taurus, it appears that the dancing of Bees was a huge inspiration on human cultures then. The ‘dance’ visioned as being sacred with an image of the Queen Bee being central to all movements by the bees.
I believe that the human interpretation then was that the "dancing Bees" would have been an imagery of dancing around the Queen Bee. Then this imagery being visioned as being the dance of all life?
Maybe a dance around the Mother Goddess being the connecting spirit of us all and all life that is seeded, born, grows and matures. So there we have images of The Mother Goddess Queen Bee of plants, trees, insects, fish, reptiles, mammals and ourselves, us humans.
I believe this is the origin of several ritual dances and folk dramas that have evolved, and are still performed today, to celebrate and promote fertility and nature's abundance.
The Bee Dance Within Labyrinths?
In Australia, there are aboriginal cave paintings of Beehives dating back to around 10,000 BC. These painting also include images of men that seem to be carrying bags of honey over their shoulders. Close to these images of men with honey are spiraling circles. These are the same images we see around ancient Ireland, such as within Newgrange and on Pictish art within East and North East Scotland.
Many mystics interpret these spirals to represent planetary alignments or some kind of mapping for the flow of life, the flow of Qi.
Aborigines are still very close to honey as a sacred food. Their ‘shamans’ still perform rituals to increase their finds and supply of honey from their hives. This honey, and other beehive products, are essential for them for a variety of both medicinal and nutritional uses.
Could it be that the spirals, especially if they are featured as triple spirals, were created not to align heavens, spirits and life flows but to honour, venerate and align with the Bees, or the Bee Goddess?
Minoan Bull in A Labyrinth,
Maybe within a Beehive?
The Minoans, a Bronze Age society famous for its extraordinary expansive overseas trade, were a culture that seems to have been strongly guided by bull images and bee traditions.
British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans christened this ancient race, "The Minoan" race, around 1900, after the deeds of ancient King Minos
The ‘Minoan’ ritual of bull-leaping, interpreted from discovered and restored ancient art is quite a wonder. It seems that Mionoam sportsmen grabbed the bull's horns to antagonize the animal who would then catapult them up and backward. While in the air these ‘sportsmen’ seemed to perform acrobatic stunts before landing again.
It is speculated that these ‘bull leapers’ symbolically represented Theseus, leaping over the constellation of Taurus.
The famous Cretan Labyrinth was commissioned to the royal craftsman Daedalus, by King Minos. Mythical descriptions of this famous labyrinth, with its Bull headed minotaur, recall an image of the entire labyrinth being within a Beehive shaped structure. Some storytellers tell of the winding passages, of this famouse labyrinth, guiding souls on a journey through to the afterlife rather than telling stories of the wrath of the Minotaur.
I wonder how much this Minoan labyrinth image is connected to the much more ancient shamanic Bee image labyrinths of ancient aboriginal Australia?
Honey was a valuable elixir exported by the Minoans, an later bards telling of this hone being distributed as a "magic potion" to ensure a long and healthy life.
As a preservative, honey cannot be beaten. It is said that honey that was used to mummify ancient bodies 1000s of years ago is still safely edible today.
The importance of Beekeeping in Minoan times has been speculated from the abundance of Minoans hieroglyphs that graphically illustrate beehives around the palaces.
Several gold rings of Minoan craftsmen that date from around 1500 BC, have been discovered on Crete, and other places around Greece, portraying bee-headed goddesses or goddesses holding bull's horns above their heads.
Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness
Though there appears to have been extreme Minoan reverence for Bulls and Honey, Minoan honey is also heavily symbolized by Lions, but I will only briefly touch on that imagery.
The first Lion imagery I think of those is the Tate And Lyle logo of the dead Lion carcass surrounded by swarming bees. Tate And Lyle, if you did not know, have been a long time sugar crystal and syrup refiner. Their Lion logo has been around since 1885. It was first used on their Golden Syrup product sold as a lower cost alternative to honey. Soon it was on their Black Treacle molasses product.
The slogan under the bee swarmed dead lion on their products is "Out of the strong came forth sweetness". This refers to a Biblical story in chapter 14 of the Book of Judges.
Samson was travelling to the land of the Philistines in search of a wife. During the journey he killed a lion, and when he passed the same spot, on his return, he noticed a swarm of bees had formed a comb of honey in the carcass.
Samson later turned this observation into a riddle at his wedding. "Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness". The founders, Tate and Lyle, were Presbyterian devotees.
Much more to follow in ‘part 3’ …
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