"Bees, like all insects that spin cocoons or weave webs, serve as images of the miraculous interconnectedness of life.  The intricate cellular structure that secretes the golden essence of life is an image of the network of invisible nature that relates all things to each other in an ordered harmonious pattern.  Perhaps this is the meaning of the tale in which the infant Zeus is fed on honey in Crete, and why honey was the nectar of the gods.  Furthermore, the busy bee, following the impulsion of its nature to pollinate the flowers and gather their nectar to be transformend into honey, was an example of the continual activity required of human beings to gather the crops and transform them into food.  The queen bee, whom all the others serve during their brief lives, was, in teh Neolithic, an epiphany of the Goddess herself. 

 

 

 

 

   Honey also played a central part in the New Year rituals of the Minoans.  The Cretan New Year began at the summer solstice, when the heat was at its greatest, and 20 July was the day when the great star Sirius rose in conjunction with the Sun, as it did also in Sumeria and Egypt.  In these two other countries Sirius was explicitly the star of the goddess (Innana in Sumeria, and Isis in Egypt), and Minoan temple-palaces in Crete were orientated to this star.  The rising of Sirius ended a 40-day ritual during which honey was gathered from the hives of the bees in the darkness of the caves and the woods.  The honey was then fermented into mead and drunk as an intoxicating liquor, accompanying the ecstatic rites that may have celebrated the return of the daughter of the goddess as the beginning of the new year – as, perhaps in the seal of the double axe. 

 

 

<<<The importance of bee-keeping to the Minoans is documented in the Linear A hieroglyphs, where there are already drawings of actual beehives, testifying to a long history probably going back to the Neolithic era. The onyx gem from Knossos shows the Bee Goddess bearing upon her head the bull’s horns with the double axe inside their curve.  The dogs – later the dogs of the underworld belonging to Hecate and Artemis – are winged and flying so close to the goddess that their wings, at first glance, appear as hers. 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Greek Homeric Hymn to Hermes written down in the eighth century BC, the god Apollo speaks of three female seers as three bees or bee-maidens, who like himself, practiced divination:

               There are some Fates sisters born,

                maidens hree of them, adorned with swift wings.

                Their heads are sprinkled over ith white barley meal,

                wind they make their homes under the cliffs of Parnassus.

    They taught divination far off from me, the art I used to practise

     round my cattle while still a boy.

 

These sacred bee-maidens with their gift of prophecy, were to be Apollo’s gift to Hermes, the god who alone could lead the souls of the dead out of life and sometimes back again.  The etymology of the word ‘fate’ in Greek offers a fascinating example of how the genius of the Minoan vision entered the Greek language, often visibly, as well as informing its stories of goddesses and gods.  The Greek word for ‘fate’, ‘death’ and ‘goddess of death’ is e ker (feminine); the word for’heart’ and ‘breast’ is to ker (neuter); while the word for ‘honeycomb’ is to kerion (neuter).  The common root ker links the ideas fo the honeycomb, goddess, death, fate and the human heart, a nexus of meanings that is illumined if we know that the goddess was once imagined as a bee.

 

Text from The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image  by Anne Baring & Jules Cashford

The precise identity of the Bee Goddess remains a great mystery.  Nevertheless, she is a very strong spirit for these times of  great transition.   Signs of her worship are evident in the Mediterranean cultures of around 3,000 years ago at the temples of Artemis.  She is one of the oldest and  most popular aspects of the Divine Feminine.  Born on the Greek Island of Delos,  Artemis was sister of Apollo and daughter to Zeus and Leto.  When she was a young girl, her father, Zeus, asked her what was her dream? She answered that she wished to never have to marry a man and to always be free to roam in the wild forest.  Artemis was known as a patron of young virgins, and a powerful protectress of the natural world of fertility.  As with other early Goddesses, ceremonies to invoke Artemis were held in groves of trees, at places of special rock outcroppings, at sacred sites along rivers or at quiet springs.  Ironically,  Artemis's blessings  were  evenutally  cultivated at exquisite  temple sites constructed throughout the Mediterranean region.

 The Temple of Artemis (Greek: Ἀρτεμίσιον Artemision, Latin: Artemisium), also known less precisely as Temple of Diana, was a temple dedicated to Artemis completed, in its most famous phase, around 550 BC at Ephesus (in present-day Turkey) under the Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian Empire. Nothing remains of the temple— not the first on its site— which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. (text from Wikipedia)

Melissa, the goddess as Queen Bee, taught mortals how to ferment honey into mead.  In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the Melissai feed on honey and are inspired "to speak the truth".  These traditions made the omphalos the place of sacred utterance -- the oracular power associated with the buzzing of bees and the buzzing vibration of life. . . . .

 They, too, represent birth, death, and reincarnation.  Bees have an acute sense of time. They appear to use their internal circadian clocks in conjunction with the Sun's position in the sky to navigate.  Because their time memory is so advanced, they can be trained to appear at certain times of the day for feedings.  An individual bee within the hive an communicate the location and richness of a newly discovered food source by dancing and drumming with its wings.  The queen bee, deep in the hive, lays up to two thouand eggs a day, but only a fw male drone mate with the queen -- and just once, since the sexual act ends in his death.  All these properties are echoed in historical rituals and mythologies. 

 

 

Walking in their footsteps now.  Listening to their voices always whispering their encouragements.     Our sensitive little wild bees and honey bees are suseptible to large scale electromagnetic influences and other toxins.  The HAARP project that's hidden in remote Alaska punctures holes in the Ionisphere to alter climate.   Chem trails dust the land with poisons. And, closer to the ground, the farmers spray insecticides on flowering fields.  Where did this evil destroyer of  beauty come from, anyway?

The ancestral Maya did not recognize a Bee Goddess.  In that patriarchal culture they saw a Bee God and the  moon Goddess, Ix Chel, was the only female diety among many male personalities.  The Maya honoured the bees in sacred ways, as portrayed in their texts and the images found therein.

 

The bee is the communicator and the courier of nourishment between mortal humans and the sun gods of the four directions.

 

The ritual of the Four World Quarters, according to

 

THE BOOK OF CHILAM BALAM OF CHUMAYEL

The red wild bees are in the east. A large red blossom is their cup. . . . . . .. .The red Plumeria is their flower.

The white wild bees are in the north. The white pach¢a  is their flower.   . . . . A large white blossom is their cup.

The black wild bees are in the west. The black laurel flower  is their flower.    A large black blossom is their cup.

The yellow wild bees are in the south. A large yellow blossom is their cup . . . is their flower