Bees have a place in human history. The mythology that surrounds them is potent and indicates a close and reciprocal relationship between the bee and the human race as companions in life’s great journey. Traditionally the bee was perceived as the insect that bridged the gap between the physical world and the unseen world, the intermediary between two states of existence. In many cultures priestesses or illumined ones have been referred to as ‘bees’.

The bee was an emblem of Potnia, the Minoan-Mycenaean “Mistress”, also referred to as “The Pure Mother Bee”. Her priestesses received the name of “Melissa” (“bee”). In addition, priestesses worshipping Artemis and Demeter were called “Bees”. The Delphic priestess is often referred to as a bee, and Pindar notes that she remained “the Delphic bee” long after Apollo had usurped the ancient oracle and shrine. “The Delphic priestess in historical times chewed a laurel leaf,” Harrison noted, “but when she was a Bee surely she must have sought her inspiration in the honeycomb.” Ernst Neustadt, in his monograph on Zeus Kretigenes, “Cretan-born Zeus,” devoted a chapter to the honey-goddess Melissa.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo acknowledges that Apollo’s gift of prophecy first came to him from three bee maidens, usually identified with the Thriae. The Thriae was a trinity of pre-Hellenic Aegean bee goddesses.
The Kalahari Desert’s San people tell of a bee that carried a mantis across a river. The exhausted bee left the mantis on a floating flower but planted a seed in the mantis’s body before it died. The seed grew to become the first human.
In Egyptian mythology, bees grew from the tears of the sun god Ra when they landed on the desert sand. The bowstring on Hindu love god Kamadeva’s bow is made of honeybees.
Orators, powerful speakers and those who can enrapture their audience through their linguistic ability are said to have lips that have been anointed with honey.

From the earliest times of our agrarian history the relationship between farmers and bees that pollinate and confirm their crops has been one of reciprocal maintenance. The bee is the agent of pollination, the catalyst that brings about change and facilitates fertilization, allowing the crop to mature, develop and reproduce. It is easy to see why their function is considered so important and why the bee is ascribed a mystical place within the human experience.

Lately there has been an alarming and so far inexplicable decline in bee colony numbers. This year alone over one third of bee colonies in the US have simply disappeared; a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder or ‘Mary Celeste Syndrome’. Various theories from parasites to pesticides have been speculated but the reality is that no-one actually knows why this is happening. The potential consequences are vast. This is not limited to the US, it is a worldwide happening and indicative of a shift or change occurring within the planet’s own equilibrium.

Take the traditional perception of the bee as an intermediary, a messenger from those peripheral realms of human awareness where perceptions sneak in ‘under the wire’. The bee carries a signal or a frequency that enables transformation, it enables the sterile to become fertile and initiates the process of regeneration. The bee, in this context, represents an interlocutor between our immediate mundane awareness and the ‘deep space’ of human cognizance. Whatever the potential ramifications of this development, one thing is certain, huge transition is happening. Look to the flora and fauna worlds, all nature, as the messenger of what is to come.

Whatever anyone’s feelings about it, we live in interesting times. We are those people at that time that will experience remarkable transition. Good, bad or indifferent is not a criteria; we will see things in our lifetimes such as the rapid disintegration of the bee population, that have a significant bearing upon the way that our lives are lived. Ultimately the end of bees on this planet would, de facto, represent the extinction of the human race.

In his book The Creation, the world’s most celebrated biologist, E O Wilson, has spelt out what would happen if the vortex swallowed insects. “People need insects,” he says, “but insects do not need us. If all humankind were to disappear tomorrow, it is unlikely that a single insect species would go extinct, except three forms of human body and head lice… In two or three centuries, with humans gone, the ecosystems of the world would regenerate back to the rich state of near-equilibrium that existed ten thousand or so years ago… But if insects were to vanish, the terrestrial environment would soon collapse into chaos.”
Flowering plants would go first, then herbaceous plants, then insect-pollinated shrubs and trees, then birds and animals and, finally, the soil. Wilson corrects the generally held misapprehension that the principal “turners and renewers” of the soil are worms. That distinction more properly belongs to insects and their larvae. Without them, bacteria and fungi would feast on the decaying plant and animal remains, while — for as long as it was able to support them — the land would be recolonised by a small number of fern and conifer species. The human diet would be wind-pollinated grasses and whatever remained to be harvested from a fished-out sea. It would not be enough. Widespread starvation would shrink the population to a fraction of its former size.
“The wars for control of the dwindling resources, the suffering, and the tumultuous decline to dark-age barbarism would be unprecedented in human history.” Wilson concedes that we might survive quite happily without body lice and malarial mosquitoes. Otherwise, he says: “Do not give thought to diminishing the insect world. It would be a serious mistake to let even one species of the millions on Earth go extinct.”

The relationship between ourselves and the planet our home is fragile, delicate and the most potent expression of what we may become either as architects of our own demise or as the agents of a transcendent future.

image: wolfpix