Most people take honey bees for granted. They make honey, we figure, and honey ends up in granola and shampoo and herbal tea, but we don't think much more about it. In fact, something like a third of our food would not be possible without bees.
This is because a lot of our crop plants have to be pollinated, the fruits and nuts and vegetables (though not the grains). They flower, but they don't set seed or fruit unless the flower is pollinated. And unless we want a whole horde of people out there with little brushes, swiping pollen a flower at a time, we need bees to do it for us.
Medieval people understood this just fine. Domesticated bees had already been around for several thousand years at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Every medieval manor or village, every orchard had to have a hive of bees. The bees, led by their queen, lived in it, and this was where they had their honey comb. Beekeepers who knew how to keep from startling the bees (and who wore protective covering) would harvest the honey and keep the hive clean. The bees thus served two main functions, pollinating fruits and vegetables and providing the only real source of sweetness in the medieval diet. In addition, the wax of the honeycomb was used for high-grade candles in church.
There was a great deal of folklore associated with bees. They were considered a symbol of hard work and industriousness, as we still use the expression, Busy as a bee. The Merovingian kings of France of the fifth through eighth centuries used bees as their symbol, a symbol Napoleon borrowed to try to assert he was part of a thousand-year tradition. A rural English tradition is that you have to "tell the bees" about any major life changing event, but it is not clear if this goes back to the Middle Ages.
Medieval philosophers thought that bees were born without feet, which of course is not true, although medieval bestiaries commonly repeated this idea. This is because Isidore of Seville (writer of the late Merovingian era) said that the word apies, Latin for bee, came from a- (without) and -pies, meaning feet (which it doesn't).
Modern agriculture continues to depend on bees. There are wild bees that will pollinate flowers, but the honey bee is really necessary, meaning it has become the basis of an industry, where bee keepers take their hives around to wherever pollination is needed. "Colony collapse," the death of a hive due to mites or fungus, has been a real challenge to bee keepers in recent years.
It was quite fortuitous, but I posted this on what turned out to be World Bee Day.
© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.
