Bee Lore

In his book “Sacred Geometry – Philosophy and Practice”, Robert Lawlor has an interesting picture on the connection between sacred geometry and the honey bee.  Lawlor draws attention to the ubiquitous relationship between One and the Square Root of Two (or 1:1.41421356…) and shows this in the diagram below:

Excerpt from page 31 “Sacred Geometry – Philosophy and Practice”

Next to it he writes a rather elegant piece on the root:

“The Root of a Plant, like the mathematical root, is causative, the former being embedded in the earth, the latter embedded in the square. The visible growth of a plant , its proliferation into specificity, depends upon the root for stability and nutrition. The Plant root nourishes because it is able to break down ( divide) the fixed, dense mineral constituents of the soil.”

“In the vital sense the geometric root is an archetypal expression of the assimilative , generating, transformative function which is root. Like the vegetal root, the root of 2 contains the power of nature which destroys in order to progress ( it severs the initial square) and it also contains the power which instantaneously transforms 1 into 2 ..”

Further on in the book, Lawlor states that:

“The Fibonacci Series perfectly delineates the breeding pattern of rabbits, a symbol of fecundity, and the ration of males to females in honey bee hives”.

The Fibonacci Series is a mathematically beautifully elegant number that I came across when I was about 13.  I was so excited when I discovered it, that I thought I had created one of the most brilliant mathematical break-throughs of the twentieth century – only to find that Fibonacci had beaten me to it (and prior to that Indian Mathematicians) many centuries before!   The golden number (as it is often called) is denoted by the Greek letter phi and approximately equal to 1.61818….

If Lawlor is right, it  would mean that there would be many more drones in my hives than I see every year… the male to female ratio (drone to worker ratio) is not anything like 1:1.6… – there are far fewer drones than that – and many of them are probably itinerants from other colonies!  The proportion also changes through the year – as the drones are pushed out of the hive in the Autumn by the worker bees and there are none in the hive over winter (unless it is a queenless hive).  This is probably because the drones eat three times more than the worker bees!

So, as elegant as some of the theories are in this book, I feel that sometimes the myth is created to make the magic!  However, I am sure you will agree that there is much evidence on the other posts on this site that there is still considerable magic in studying the lore of the honeybee!

The book contains amazing insights and illustrations on the theme of sacred geometry.  You can see more if you take a look at the link below:

Originally found at: http://www.milliande.com/Mysteries-of-the-Melissae-Sacred-Geometry-and-the-Honey-Bee.html

See also: https://beelore.com/2008/01/20/the-melissae-and-aphrodite-in-ancient-greece/