Of all the ceremonies surrounding Elizabeth II’s lengthy funeral, which will conclude with the state funeral this Monday, the strangest may have been the moment when the Queen’s hives in charge, John Chapple, announced the death of the sovereign to the bees , who died on September 8 at the age of 96. This rite, revealed by the Chron, consisted of approaching each hive at Clarence House and Buckingham Palace and saying the following phrase: “The mistress is dead, but do not go. Your master will be a good master to you.” And then wrap them with a black bow. However, this is by no means an exotic ritual, but a tradition that is deeply rooted worldwide.
In Offering to the Storm, a novel by Spanish author Dolores Redondo, the following scene is recorded: “When someone was dying in Baztán, the lady of the house went into the field to the place where they had the hives, and by a magic formula He divided with the bees the loss and the need to make more wax for the candles to light the deceased during the wake and burial.” In his classic Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain relates the following: “If a man had a beehive and that man died , the bees had to be told before the sun rose again the next morning or they would get sick, stop working and die.
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A painting by the British nature painter Charles Napier Hemy (1841-1917) shows a widow and her son walking through the hives to deliver the message to the insects. It says exactly tell the bees. You can even watch a 1926 Dutch film on YouTube in which a man solemnly approaches his hives, pipe between his teeth, to explain a family mishap to the bees.
Charles Napier Hemy’s painting Telling the bees (1897).
The Mieladictos blog, coordinated and written by the beekeeper Alberto Colina, collects many other examples of a tradition that has migrated from Europe to America, of which there are numerous testimonies. “Bees have always been associated with the moment of death,” explains Dolores Redondo, who says the scene she recreated in her novel came from the valley’s oral tradition. There the words “Erliak, erliak Gaur hil da etxeko nausia Erliak, erliak, Eta behar da elizan argia” are pronounced, which can be translated as: “Bees, bees, today the mistress of the house died. Bees, bees, we need wax in the church.”
“When I was writing the trilogy, I was amazed at the number of similar rites that existed in many parts of the world,” says the Navarran author. “For example, there is a tradition in Galicia that associates the humming of bees with the liberation of the soul after death,” he continues. When the dead person was waking up, there was a moment when everyone who was in the house went into the room where the deceased was and imitated the hum to ease the transition to the other world.
Eva Crane, a British scholar who spent her life studying bees and beekeeping, devotes the sixth chapter of her classic The Book of Honey (Fund of Economic Culture, although unfortunately out of print) to these ceremonies. The title is “Tell the Bees”. “One of the consequences of the secularization of bees,” writes the scholar, who died in 2007, “seems to have been the increased consideration of them in the family environment. In fact, they are considered part of the family. The rite of telling “the bees” of a death or other family event is one of the most remembered of all the customs related to bees and honey.”
Detail of a bee in Maintal (Germany) ARNE DEDERT (AFP)
Crane, in his book, locates the first traces of this rite in the 16 most common, if the homeowner accidentally dies, will all bees in their hives die unless the hives are immediately moved to another location? And yet I know this has happened to people who are not tainted by superstition.”
British folklorist Mark Norman published a book by that exact title: Telling the Bees and Other Customs: The Folklore of Rural Crafts. His explanation is consistent with Crane’s: although some scholars argue that it dates back to Celtic mythology, which believed in the relationship between bees and the soul – there it would connect with Galician traditions – he claims that it was in the 18th century .century XIX.
“We found evidence that it was widespread in both America and Europe at the time,” writes Norman. “It was well documented in New England, so it could have traveled all the way to America with the colonists. Notification of a death to the bees was given beehive by beehive. The beekeeper first struck the hive before spreading the news of death, and the hive was also covered with a black cloth or similar piece during the mourning period. In some places bees were sung to instead of being spoken to. It was considered very unfortunate to ignore the bees and not notify them of a death or other important family event. Otherwise the bees would either leave the hive or die.”
It’s a tradition which, as the Queen’s death has shown, hasn’t entirely disappeared, at least not in the UK. Stephen Fleming, a beekeeper and co-director of British magazine BeeCraft, told the New York Times that he performed a similar ceremony when a friend of his died. “I think he would have liked that.” However, the beekeeper Alberto Colina explains that it was deleted in Spain: “I made a quick telephone consultation between beekeepers from the Valencian Community, La Rioja and the Basque Country and they do not know that the goodbye of the bees. They tell me they have heard about bee farewells in the Las Hurdes area of Extremadura. I don’t know anything about Castilla y León either. From the looks of it, today we care more about the price of honey and the health of the bees.”
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Charles Napier Hemy’s painting Telling the bees (1897).
Detail of a bee in Maintal (Germany) ARNE DEDERT (AFP)
