It's Folklore Friday at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and today is all about bees! From their Facebook post:
Folklore Friday: Bees pollinate a third of everything we eat and play a vital role in sustaining the planet’s ecosystems. At Corkscrew they make their hives in the hollows of the cypress, and usually go unnoticed unless pointed out by our naturalists. In addition to providing honey, bees are thought to have magical properties. The Greeks believed that a baby whose lips were touched by a bee would become a great poet or speaker. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs used the honeybee as a royal symbol. In Celtic mythology, bees were regarded as beings of great wisdom and as spirit messengers between worlds.
Other beliefs were that if the bees heard you quarrelling or swearing they would leave so you must talk to them in a gentle manner. It was a bad omen if a swarm settled on a dead branch for it meant death for someone in the bee keeper’s family or for the person who witnessed it. If a bee lands on your hand, it means money is coming your way. A single bee entering your house was a sign of good luck, usually in the form of wealth. Bees are, in some cultures, associated with purity because the worker bees that produce honey never mate. Honey was treated as a magical substance and used in many rituals. Mead, an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water, was considered to have prophetic powers and was called ‘nectar of the Gods’. A bee may visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just one pound of honey. Thus, bees are associated with hard work and diligence. That is where the phrase “Busy as a bee” comes from. Author J.K. Rowling named Professor Albus Dumbledore for an archaic English word related to bees. She says that when writing, she imagined the headmaster of Hogwarts "wandering around the castle humming to himself," and so chose to associate his name with bees.
