When we moved into our new cottage, we soon met the neighbours. One neighbour told us of an old lady who has kept bees for over forty years who lives a bit further up the lane. One day her bees swarmed into the next door field and settled……….on a white horse – owned by our neighbour! The swarm then left the horse and finally settled in a tree. The old lady (a bit younger then) caught the swarm and put it back into one of her hives. Quite extraordinary! I have heard of swarms settling in many strange places – but never on a horse! When I finally met the old lady, she was not aware the bees had settled on the horse. Perhaps it is just a good story! Who knows?
At the weekend, our local beekeeping group held their annual honey show. I met a very interesting lady who was the “wax mistress” – with some beautiful exhibits made from beeswax. I was intrigued to know how to separate wax from honey and pollen – as I have a whole load of this mixture that I have collected over the past year from the hive and from the honey extracting process. She told me one of her tricks. She advised me to put the wax in a baker’s tin which has the bottom cut out – and to line the tin with lint (from the chemists), fuzzy side up. The lint is kept in place with a piece of string. The baker’s tray is then hung from the top rack of your oven with a wire coat hanger. Below is the collecting tray or bowl – which has a small amount of rainwater in the bottom to stop the wax from sticking. The oven is set at 50 degrees Centigrade and the wax should melt through the lint and into the collecting tray, floating on top of the rainwater. This all sounds quite obvious once you hear it – but would take ages of trial-and-error to come up with it from scratch.
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One of the most intriguing things that I have learnt about bees is the unexplainable magic of drone congregation areas. Why magic? On lazy-hazy sunny days, year after year, genration after generation, drones will congregate in particular areas to wait for any passing queens that need mating. Yet how do the drones know where these areas are when when old drones are kicked out of the hives in Autumn and a new generation of drones only reappear the next year when the queen starts laying new drones in the Spring?
Drones being pushed out of the hive in Autumn
Geographic knowledge passed on from one generation of drones to the next without direct communication – as if by magic! Perhaps the same magic that birds use generation-after-generation to migrate from one part of the world to another?
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A queen bee, the mother of all bees in the hive, will lay an average of 1500 eggs in a day!
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The next second or two are a blank. Just as people in an accident can often remember some parts with extreme clarity and then blank-out, so I had a blank moment. I suppose it makes sense if you think about it. All these sensations and feelings piled up into a couple of seconds must mean that your brain has gone into overload. My brain must have done that. I didn’t run. I didn’t get a large adrenalin-rush and feel my heart race at double its normal pace. I just stood there and watched in awe. It was a bit like watching one of those old movies when the frames don’t quite mesh together and time jumps from one scene to the next leaving a bit out in the middle. That is what happened. One moment I was looking at the dark sun with the indescribable humming noise. The next thing I remember was looking at the railing on the fence about two metres in front of me to see a large black ball appear. It seemed to grow in front of me like a balloon which was being blown up – and it kept on getting larger and larger until eventually the buzzing got quieter, the sun returned to its normal brightness and the balloon became a large black blob about the size of a medicine ball with a moving skin.
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Well the kitchen has been full of the tools for the honey harvest over the past few weeks. With unpacking boxes and extracting and bottling the honey, our lives have been quite busy. We got 113 pounds off – quite a bit more than last year. Of the hives, Faith has come up trumps again, giving us about 5 supers. Hope is no more. The hive was taken over by wasps in August – due to negligence when the move was going on. And Charity seems to have a new lease of life in the past weeks and might survive winter, if only the queen can lay some new brood. A local very experienced beekeeper gave me a great tip about putting back on the hives the extracted supers. Several of the supers went solid. He told me to de-cap the comb and spray it with water. In fact, I left it out for two or three days to capture some moisture – which seemed to have the same effect – and then put them back on the hive on top of a queen excluder below an empty super. The bees think that the gap is not part of the hive and they draw-down the crystallised honey to make winter stores. He said you can also put one frame to allow the bees to climb up. A great way of feeding the bees for winter – though I am not sure if it will bring the queens on laying brood too late in the season. It has been a very mild September so far – so hopefully all will be well. Though Hope is gone, I will re-start her with a new colony next year. Never give up Hope!
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According to one ancient egyptian myth, honey bees were the tears of the sun god Ra. In this context, the bee was seen as the messenger of the gods, falling down, like tears, towards the earth (and man) to pass on some secret message.
The above symbol was called the Udjat in ancient times. It is now more commonly called the Eye of Ra or Eye of Horus and represents the right eye of the Egyptian Falcon God Horus and was also associated with the Sun God Ra. It is supposed to be where the tears (or bees) came from.
According to another legend, the left eye was torn from Horus by his brother Seth. It was magically restored by Thoth, the God of Magick. After the restoration, some stories state, Horus made a gift of the eye to Osiris, which allowed this solar deity to rule the underworld.
The Eye of Horus was also believed to have healing and protective power, and it was used as a protective amulet, and as a medical measuring device, using the mathematical proportions of the eye to determine the proportions of ingredients in medical preparations) to prepare medications. The Egyptians did write prescriptions. Those prescriptions were composed first of magical verses and then secondly the real prescription. The Eye of Horus was an important part of the magical part of the prescription. With time the magical part became smaller, and the real prescription more important. Eventually, all that was left of the magical verse was the Eye of Horus. The sign has remained in pharmacist’s shorthand to this day with Rx being the sign for a prescription! Many bee products are used for healing and it is likely that there the direct connection between bees and good health goes back before Ancient Egypt.
Together, the left and right eyes represented the whole of the universe, a concept similar to that of the Taoist Yin-yang symbol. Spiritually, the right eye reflects solar, masculine energy, as well as reason and mathematics. The left eye reflects fluid, feminine, lunar energy, and rules intuition and magic. Together, they represent the combined, transcendent power of Horus.
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Legend has it that about 4,000 years ago, in Babylon, the bride’s father gave his son-in-law honey beer or meade for a whole month (or moon) after the wedding ceremony. Alcoholic honey for a month, with plenty of time for the couple to enjoy time together! Quite a difference from today’s tradition of a honeymoon being long holiday away from home – and normally much less than a month!
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A story of eastern European origin probably derives from a time when many gods were worshipped, later being altered to conform with the Christian monotheistic concept:
The devil was spying on God when He was creating the birds and insects. God took a bit of mist from the air, spun it in His fingers and called out the name of the new creature, “Bee!” And so the first bee was brought to life. The devil was a bit confused by what he saw and thought that God had called the creature into existence by telling it to “Be!” So when he tried a similar trick, gathering up a bit of clay from the earth and mixing it with his own sweat he told it to “Fly!” Of course, in this way it was not another beautiful bee that was formed but the ugly and pesky fly that, ever since, has plagued humans as much as bees have benefitted them.
(The author altered the “letter” of the story a bit to maintain its spirit. In the original, Hungarian, version the word-play centers on “legy” meaning both “become” and a “fly”).
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Bee Lore 
