So in our last post, we mentioned that Sophia’s grandparents gifted us our first bees because of the old wives’ tale that you should never buy your own first colony. They should be gifted to you.
At the time, we treated it as a nice little tradition. Sweet. A bit quaint. The sort of thing you mention at a dinner party and people go “oh, that’s lovely.”
Then we fell down a research rabbit hole, and “nice little tradition” turned into one of the most extraordinary stories we’ve ever come across.
Because this isn’t just a quirky superstition. This is a belief system that stretches across continents and millennia, rooted in the ancient conviction that bees are sacred creatures from Paradise itself. And the more we read, the more we sat there going “…wait, WHAT?”
Kettle on. This is a big one.
The Rule (And Its Loopholes)
The core belief is simple: bees must never be purchased with ordinary money. They should be gifted, inherited, bartered for, or, best of all, arrive of their own accord as a wild swarm that chooses to settle with you.
But like all good folk rules, there were loopholes.
The most famous comes from a Sussex rhyme recorded in 1871: “If you would wish your bees to thrive, Gold must be paid for ev’ry hive; For when they’re bought with other money, There will be neither swarm nor honey.” Gold, as a “noble metal” with its own quasi sacred associations, was the one exception some regions allowed. Because apparently bees have standards about currency.
Victorian biologist Margaret Warner Morley wrote in 1899 that “it is a widespread superstition that bees must not be bought with money but must be exchanged for some product of nature.” On Dartmoor, the acceptable exchange was a half sack of wheat. In other areas, chickens, livestock, or (most fittingly) honey and comb could be offered instead.
But the ideal was never to exchange anything at all. The best way to get bees was as a gift. A “borrowed swarm” given on the understanding you’d return it if needed was also considered lucky. And the absolute jackpot? A wild swarm that simply chose to settle with you, as if the bees themselves had decided you were worthy.
A West Cork saying captured this perfectly: “You should never buy bees but let them come to you. If you liked bees they would come; if not, they would stay away.”
We’re going to choose to believe our bees like us.
Some traditions even focused the taboo on the seller rather than the buyer. An English folk belief held that “when you sell bees, you sell your luck with them.” Yet a competing tradition insisted bees must be sold at a fair price, since undervaluing them was disrespectful. The contradiction is revealing. Folk belief isn’t a legal code. It’s a living, breathing web of local practice, and the underlying principle was always the same: bees deserve reverence, not haggling.
Why? Because Bees Came From Paradise
The commercial taboo makes sense only when you understand what our ancestors believed bees actually were.
Welsh folklore specifically held that bees, like humans, were the only creatures to have come from Paradise. If bees came from God’s garden, they occupied a category utterly unlike cattle, sheep, or chickens. Celtic mythology reinforced this by treating bees as messengers between the living and the dead, capable of travelling between this world and the spirit realm. The Scottish saying “Ask the wild bee for what the druid knew” captures the idea that bees possessed ancient, otherworldly knowledge.
In Scottish Highland belief, a person’s soul could take the form of a bee during sleep. German folk stories described souls leaving sleeping bodies as bees flying from their mouths, and if the bee was trapped, the sleeper died.
Here’s one that stopped us in our tracks. The Albanian language uses the same word for a bee’s death (vdes) as for a human’s. Never the word used for animal death (ngordh). A linguistic fossil preserving the ancient belief that bees were not ordinary animals.
Sophia’s reaction to that one: “So when a bee dies, it’s like a person dying?”
In Albanian, yes. In Albanian, it literally is.
Telling the Bees (The Tradition That Made Us Cry)
The most famous expression of the bee/human bond is the tradition of “telling the bees.” The widespread European custom of informing your hives about deaths, marriages, births, and other major family events.
The ritual varied by region but always involved addressing each hive individually. A family member would knock on the hive (sometimes three times, sometimes with a key from the house) and deliver the news in a low voice. Failure to tell the bees was believed to cause them to stop producing honey, abandon the hive, or die of grief.
But the story that properly got us was this one.
In March 1961, in Myddle, Shropshire, a beekeeper named Sam Rogers died suddenly. His children walked round his fourteen hives telling the bees. The day after his funeral, during a memorial service at the church, swarms of bees flew a mile and a half from Rogers’ cottage to settle on the flowers covering his grave. The chairman of the Shropshire Beekeepers’ Association said he had never heard of anything like it. Bees were normally sluggish in early March. By nightfall, every bee had returned home.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t tear up reading that. Bee Girl read it over my shoulder and went very quiet for a minute, then said: “We should always tell our bees things.”
We should. And we will.
The tradition persists at the highest levels. After Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September 2022, Royal Beekeeper John Chapple formally told the bees of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, knocking on each hive and saying: “The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you.” He draped black ribbons on every hive.
Bee Priestesses, Ancient Law, and an Irish Manuscript From 1350
The sacred status of bees wasn’t just folk superstition. It was enshrined in formal religion and codified in law.
In ancient Greece, priestesses of Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, and the Delphic Oracle were all called Melissae, which means “honeybees.” Christianity absorbed and amplified this reverence. St. Ambrose of Milan, whose infant face was legendarily covered by a swarm that left honey on his tongue, became patron saint of beekeepers. St. Modomnoc, a 6th century Irish monk, is credited with bringing bees to Ireland. And St. Gobnait, a 6th century Irish woman, commanded an army of bees against invaders and used honey to heal plague victims.
(Sophia would like everyone to know that St. Gobnait is “basically a superhero” and she is “not wrong.”)
Then there’s the legal side, which is where it gets really relevant for us as Irish beekeepers.
The Bechbretha (“Bee judgments”), composed in 7th century Ireland as part of the Brehon law system, is one of the most extraordinary legal documents in European history. Over twenty pages devoted entirely to bees. It specified that if someone was stung but did not retaliate by killing the bee, they were owed a meal of honey. If someone died from a sting, their family received two full hives in compensation. Stealing bees was a capital offence.
An original manuscript, written by scribe Hugh McEgan on Christmas Eve 1350, survives at Trinity College Dublin.
Seven hundred years ago, on Christmas Eve, someone sat down and carefully wrote out the law of bees. That feels important somehow.
The Weird and Wonderful Bits
We could have stopped there, but the deeper you go into bee folklore, the stranger and more wonderful it gets.
Bees despise dishonesty. In northern Latvia, tree beekeepers divided honey with “the most scrupulous equality, because of the belief that bees have a deep antipathy towards dishonesty and the slightest fraud would cause the bees to emigrate or to die.”
Never count your hives. Counted bees would die.
Bees hum hymns at midnight on Christmas Eve. When Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, bees reportedly refused to hum on the new Christmas Day, which was taken as a sign of God’s displeasure. (Even the bees weren’t having it.)
A bee entering your house meant wealth was coming, but it had to leave on its own. Killing it destroyed the luck.
What This Means For Us (And Our Birthday Present)
So back to where we started. The grandparents. The birthday present. The old wives’ tale.
When Sophia’s grandparents gifted us our first colony, they weren’t just following a quirky superstition. They were (whether they knew the full extent of it or not) participating in a tradition that stretches back through the Royal Beekeeper draping black ribbons on Buckingham Palace hives, through Sam Rogers’ bees flying to his grave, through St. Modomnoc’s bees following his ship across the sea, through the Bechbretha being written by candlelight on Christmas Eve in 1350, through Greek priestesses called Melissae, all the way back to the ancient conviction that bees came from Paradise itself and deserved to be treated accordingly.
Not bought. Not sold. Given. In relationship. With respect.
What makes these traditions remarkable is not just how old they are or how far they spread, but that they persist. The Royal Beekeeper still tells the bees. Beekeepers still feel something about buying their first hive with a credit card. The superstition endures because it encodes something that modern beekeeping science has confirmed from a completely different angle: bees are not units of production but complex, sensitive social organisms whose welfare depends on the attentiveness and care of their keeper.
The old wives, it turns out, were paying a kind of attention that the modern world is only now learning to value.
So yes. Our bees were a gift. And now that we know what that really means, we’re even more grateful.
The Good, The Bad, and The Sticky:
Good: We now know our grandparent gifted bees are part of a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece and 7th century Irish law. Our birthday present just got about 8,000 years more meaningful.
Bad: We went looking for a “fun little fact” about bee superstitions and lost an entire evening falling down a rabbit hole of Celtic mythology, Greek priestesses, and spontaneous generation from dead bulls.
Sticky: Trying to explain to Bee Girl why we can’t test whether bees really do hum hymns at midnight on Christmas Eve. (“But Mum, we HAVE bees. We could just go outside and listen.” She has a point.)
Mum
Bee Happy Honey
Northern Ireland
Sources: This post draws on research from Hilda Ransome’s The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore (1937), Eva Crane’s The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999), Mark Norman’s Telling the Bees and Other Customs (2020), and the Radfords’ Encyclopedia of Superstitions. The Bechbretha manuscript is held at Trinity College Dublin.
P.S. Bee Girl has decided we need to tell our bees everything from now on. She has already told them about her school report (mostly good), her new shoes (purple), and the fact that the dog ate something suspicious in the garden. The bees have not yet responded, but she’s keeping them informed.
P.P.S. She has also asked whether, since our bees were a gift, they are technically “extra lucky.” We’re choosing to believe yes.