Bees making honey. Photo by New Jersey Farms, as seen in a fascinating honey-facts article on Green Co Services.
Bees making honey. Photo by New Jersey Farms, as seen in a fascinating honey-facts article on Green Co Services.

“Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt — marvelous error! —

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.”

~ From “Last Night As I Was Sleeping,” by Antonio Machado (in Risking Everything, ed. Roger Hausden). Read the full poem here.

A Few Things You Have to Know About Bees and Honey

In ancient times, bees were considered sacred travelers that bridged the natural world to the underworld. If you reflect on this awhile, this symbolism begins to make sense. Here are a few clues:

A gold plaque of the Bee Goddess, circa 7th century B.C., discovered in Camiros, Rhodes, and now residing at the British Museum.
A gold plaque of the Bee Goddess, circa 7th century B.C., discovered in Camiros, Rhodes, and now residing at the British Museum.

Of course, honey was a golden elixir prized for both nutritional and medicinal values. The ancients were smart that way.

They used the phrase “flowing with milk and honey” as a reference for great abundance (you’ll find this in scripture, too).

Some say that there existed Mysteries based on the bees, and that priestesses called the Melissae or The Thriai were adepts who could (among other things) apply a sort of acupuncture via bee stings — part of a field now known as apitherapy.

Honey was (and is) an effective preservative, too — archaeologists found “pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved,” reports The Smithsonian Institute in an article on the science of this miraculous substance.

Fiona MacLeod wrote of the old Gaelic ancestral tales about “the wisdom of the wild bees” — something to wonder on next time a honey bee or bumble bee buzzes near you.

And on these sweet notes …

Big Love and Honey Blessings,

Jamie

Why support your local beekeepers and buy their real local honey (vs. the not-honey big-agra you find in grocery stores?). Read this article from LifeHacker (good intel) and this article from Green Co Services.