Kvasir Symbol Database
Bee & HONEY
Entry by Joseph S. Hopkins with art by Rim Baudey for Kvasir Symbol Database at Mimisbrunnr.info, March 2020. Updated December 2023.
Description
Bees are flying insects best known for the important role they play in plant pollination worldwide. The western honey bee (Apis mellifera)—one of a few extant domesticated insect species—is best known to humankind for their production of honey and wax, historically important substances to both bees and mankind alike, surrounded by folk belief.
DATING
As is the case for many other peoples, honey bees appear to have been known to the ancient Germanic peoples throughout their history.
Sources
Bees occur in both the archaeological and textual records of the ancient Germanic peoples. For example:
Grave of Childeric I
Heathen Frankish king Childeric I died in 481 CE. Childeric I’s body was interred in 1653 in Tournai, and was found to have been buried with a variety of valuable grave goods. These included 300 golden objects depicting insects, generally considered bees.
Unfortunately, after their unearthing in 1653, most of the bees were stolen and melted down for gold. Readers can view images of the surviving objects at the Bibliothèque nationale de France website here. Inspired by Childeric’s burial goods, French ruler Napoleon would go on to employ bees as a royal emblem. (For discussion, see Ransome 2004 [1937]: 233-234)
For a Swarm of Bees
The Old English poem today known as “For a Swarm of Bees” is just as its name implies. The charm refers to bees as Sigewīf, an Old English compound meaning ‘victory women’. Scholars have noted this to be reminiscent of compounds used to describe valkyries (Old Norse valkyrja ‘chooser of the slain, chooser of the battlefield corpses’, Old English wælcyrge, wælcyrie) in the Old Norse record.
For example, folklorist Hilda Ellis Davidson writes,
An Anglo-Saxon charm for taking a swarm of bees refers to the bees as sigewīf (victory women), and this seems likely to have been a name for valkyries, who like insects moved in troops through the air to accomplish this purpose. (Davidson 1988: 96)
Davidson observes that valkyries are also associated with ravens and swans, flying creatures, in the ancient Germanic corpus (for example, Davidson highlights that ravens are referred to as ‘choosers of the slain’—Old English wælceasega—in the Old English poem Exodus, line 164, and the association between valkyries and swans occurs in the Old Norse poem Vǫlundarkviða). (Davidson 1988: 96).
Gylfaginning
While a notable honey product, mead, receives significant discussion in the Old Norse record (for example, the Mead of Poetry), honey bees themselves rarely see mention in extant Old Norse texts. As with most other biota nonnative to the comparatively unwelcoming conditions of the island, attempts at introducing honey bees to Iceland have all failed, although the island’s native bumble bee, Bombus jonellus, continues to thrive (see, for example, discussion in Crane 1999: 368).
Nonetheless, honey bees receive notable mention in Gylfaginning:
It is also said that the norns that dwell by Weird’s well [Urðarbrunnr] take water from the well each day and with it the mud that lies round the well and pour it up over the ash so that its branches may not rot or decay. And this water is so holy that all things come into that well go as white as the membrane called the skin that lies around the inside of an eggshell, as it says here:
I know an ash—its name is Yggdrasil, high tree, holy—drenched with white mud. From it comes the dews that fall in the valleys. It stands forever green above Weird’s well.
The dew that falls from it on the earth, this is what people call honeydew, and from it bees feed. Two birds feed in Weird’s well. They are called swans, and from these birds has come the species of bird that has that name. (Faulkes 1995 [1987]: 19).
(A note about translation and glossing may be useful for readers: Wyrd is the Old English precursor to modern English weird, and cognate—a linguistic sibling from the same word-mother, so to speak—with Old Norse urðr, and thus Urðarbrunnr may be rendered as ‘Wyrd’s well’ or as ‘Weird’s well’, as Faulkes does above.)
There’s a lot to break down in this section. First, we have the norns who dwell toward the base of the central sacred tree of the cosmos, and apply a treatment of white mud or loam (Old Norse aurr) to the tree from a sacred well. This method of protecting the sacred tree is comparable to, for example, the modern practice of whitewashing the base of fruit trees.
Expanding on a quoted stanza known to us today as part of the eddic poem Vǫluspá, Snorri appears to draw from traditional knowledge discussing the role of the central sacred tree: Bees feed from dew that falls from the tree, and then pollinate the land, spreading growth and crop fertility. Interestingly, here bees are mentioned in the same section as the norns and swans.
Along with the dísir, the valkyries and norns form a complex of supernatural women strongly associated with birth and death, elements of the native Germanic concept of wyrd, a notion that may be roughly compared to what we today consider ‘fate’.
Telling the Bees
The custom of “telling the bees” receives much coverage in the folklore record of the modern era, including among the continental Germanic peoples and the English (and their linguistic descendants in the Americas). Generally speaking, the folk practice may be summarized as follows: If a family maintains a bee hive, they should inform the hive of important occurrences among family members, such as a birth and—especially—a death. (For some discussion and a few examples of the custom, see Ransome 2012 [1937]: 172-173).
Analysis
The common thread among these disparate mentions appears to be an association with indigenous concepts of fate, wyrd, and the dís-norn-valkyrie complex, wherein supernatural female entities have strong associations with death, birth, and other aspects of human life—an individual’s wyrd.
In this light, it’s worth mentioning a reference made to supernatural bee women associated with fate in the ancient (Homeric) Greek record, the mysterious Thriae. Toward the end of the poem, the god Apollo tells the young deity Hermes of the trio in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes:
And now, son of glorious Maia and Zeus who holds
the aegis, helpful genius of the gods, I will tell you
another thing: there are three awesome sisters,
virgins, delighting in their swift wings.
Their heads are besprinkled with white barley flour,
and they dwell under the fold of Parnassos,
apart from me, as teachers of divination, which I studied
when as a mere child I tended the cows, and my father
did not mind. From there flying here, now there,
they feed on honeycomb and bring all things to pass.
(Athanassakis 2004 [1974]: 41-42, 80; for rendering differences, compare Cashford & Richardson 2003: 83-84)
The notion of “three awesome [bee-]women” who “bring all things to pass” and dwell beneath the mountain Parnassos (compare the above mentioned three norns at the base of Yggdrasill) sounds very much in line with the associations encountered in the sparse mentions in the ancient Germanic record, and perhaps this points to an ancient complex of beliefs stemming from a common source deep in the mists of time.
Whatever the case, on a biological level, the notion of bees connected to human wyrd is in fact a reality: We depend greatly on bees to pollinate the crops that sustain us, along with millions of other processes conducted by innumerable insects across the globe.
Yet this ancient connection is today threatened, as bees undergo a human-inflicted Ragnarök by way of a loss of habitat, insecticide use, and Colony Collapse Disorder. As the Guardian reported in 2019, bees are joined by all other insects:
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. (Carrington 2019)
Can humankind change its ways—or will there soon be no bees to tell?
ABOUT THE IMAGES
This entry contains three original pieces by Rim Baudey for Mimisbrunnr.info, all produced by the artist in 2020. They are as follows:
I.: The western honey bee (Apis mellifera).
II.: Outline of insectoid objects found in the grave of Frankish king Childeric I.
III.: Swan feathers, wood, and honey bees on the hand of a supernatural female wyrd-figure.
Readers can find wallpaper-quality versions by clicking the images. Please contact Mimisbrunnr.info for image use requests.
Sources
Athanassakis, Apostolos N. 2004 [1976]. The Homeric Hymns. Second edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Carrington, Damian. 2019. “Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature’”, February 10, 2019. The Guardian. Online. Last accessed March 3, 2020.
Cashford, Jules & Nicholas Richardson. 2003. The Homeric Hymns. Penguin Books.
Crane, Eva. 1999. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. Routledge.
Davidson, H. R. Ellis. 1988. Myths and Symbols and Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions. Manchester University Press.
Faulkes, Anthony. 1995 [1987]. Edda. Everyman.
Ransome, Hilda M. 2012 [1937]. The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. Dover.