When We Told the Bees

 

Today is the World Bee Day, and while looking up some fascinating facts about bees, I came across this beautiful old tradition called “Telling the Bees.”

Apparently, in parts of Britain and Europe, families would tell their bees about important events in their lives: births, marriages, deaths, departures and other changes within the household. In some traditions, the bees were treated almost like members of the family, and people believed they needed to be included in the news of the household.

There is something about this that stayed with me. Perhaps because I have often felt that somewhere along the way, human beings have lost a certain kind of relationship with the natural world. And even more strangely, we seem to be losing the art of being connected to one another too.

We live surrounded by people, information and technology, yet so much of our lives can feel disconnected from the living world around us. So I found myself wondering whether these old traditions represent something we once understood instinctively.

The bees were not simply creatures that produced honey. They belonged to the household. They were part of the rhythm of life. And when something important happened, someone went to tell them. I don't know whether people genuinely believed that the bees understood their words. I don't know how much of the tradition was ritual, belief, symbolism or folklore. The historical evidence tells us that the custom really was practiced, particularly in Britain and Ireland, but its deeper origins are less certain.

And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes it fascinating. Because whether or not the bees understood, the people were remembering that they were not separate from the world around them. They were living within it. That feels strangely profound to me today. What we are losing isn't something that evolution took away from us. It is something that our increasingly manufactured lives have simply made easier to forget.

The relationships. The sense that the natural world is not merely a backdrop to human life.

So, if you know more about the history of “Telling the Bees”, especially from reliable historical or folkloric sources, I would genuinely love to hear from you. I'd be happy to learn more and share what I discover here.

For now, I am simply leaving this little piece of old wisdom here. Happy World Bee Day. 🐝

Hoping that today, we can notice the bees and everything else around us that we have quietly stopped noticing.