Bees

The beehive window at my parish, Our Lady of Peace in Columbus, OH.

There are times when I find myself in the church sanctuary at night when everyone is gone and the lights are out. Each time, I’m struck by the glow of the votive candles – the little lights flickering along the walls of the church. They look like bees, like living sparks at Mary’s feet. The church is dark and quiet, and – save for the Lord – empty. And yet these little lights fill the sanctuary with movement and presence – the prayers of God’s people burning in the dark.

It reminds me of the Easter Vigil – the Church’s great night-time celebration. One of the key moments at the Vigil, just after the large Paschal Candle has been lit, is when each baptized Christian receives their own little candle, spread from hand to hand, to carry slowly into the sanctuary. I like to imagine it from above – the lights pouring slowly through the dark. It’s like honey in a golden hive – each bee at its night-time watch.

The deacon then approaches the ambo and intones the Exultet as we each clasp our flames. This is the great exaltation of Easter light, the light which is most symbolically captured in the Paschal Candle itself. But he also sings of the bees who made it: “O Holy Father,” we hear, “accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees.” He sings, too, of our own little candles: Indeed, the Paschal Candle is “a fire into many flames divided, yet never dimmed by sharing of its light, for it is fed by melting wax, drawn out by mother bees to build a torch so precious.”

Here we are, then – a hive quivering in the dark as we wait for resurrection. But what is it with the bees? Why this image at the mother of all Vigils?

Historically, the beehive has captured our imagination as something like the perfect society. This is part of the reason the Church is preoccupied with bees. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury explains that, in order to understand human civilizations, we must look to “the honeybees, creatures that, by a rule in nature, teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”¹ Housing something like 50,000 bees, each hive is a little civilization. On her own, of course, a single bee produces next to nothing. Across her lifetime, a single worker bee makes something like 1/12 teaspoon of honey. As a civilization, though, the hive produces more than 60 pounds of honey per year. Bees are masters of the common good.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the image of the beehive has been utilized for political purposes. Historically, different movements have tried to claim the structure of the hive as an argument for their political thinking. There are books that point to the hierarchy of the hive as evidence for the superiority of monarchism.² Alternatively, I found an NPR article arguing that “bees are natural democrats.”³ Napoleon’s coronation robes were covered in embroidered bees. And on it goes.

But the bee and the hive have also become important in the Catholic imagination. For starters, there is something about the honeybee – like so many other things – that calls to mind the Virgin Mary. Most bees, like Mary, are “virgins.” The female worker bees – those who make the wax and the honey – do not reproduce at all. It is only the queen bee who is a mother, reproducing with a few drone bees. And so the hive – like the Mother of Jesus – is a strange blend of both virginity and motherhood.

Another vision for Catholic attachment to bees can be seen in the Divine Comedy – that classic of Catholic literature. As Dante reaches the highest parts of the heavens, the vast communion of the saints is depicted as a great “Mystic Rose,” an enormous stadium of communing souls. Hovering back and forth between God and the Rose is the glorious host of heaven’s angels. They are, Dante says, like “bees who in one motion dive into the flowers, and in the next return the sweetness of their labors to the hive [that is God].”⁴ In the Catholic way of thinking, there is something about the bees that captures the way perfect communion works – both communion among the saints and communion with God. In the Catholic way of thinking, communal holiness is something like a beehive.

In time, the bee became so associated with Catholic thinking that even anti-Catholic writers relied on the image in their denunciations of the Church. For the Protestant poet John Milton, for instance, the Catholic bee ought not to represent the communion of heaven but the pandemonium of hell. In his iconic Paradise Lost, Lucifer and his minions are “thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air … as bees in spring-time.”⁵

Eventually, Catholicism made its association with bees almost formal. Rome, the city of the popes, is covered with little sculpted honeybees. They’re carved into stone fountains and etched onto the gates of old palaces. In the churches, they can be found in the stained glass windows, upon the ceilings, and laced into vestments. Most famously, bees cover the columns of the Baldacchino di San Pietro – the massive canopy inside St. Peter’s Basilica which stands over the main altar. The honeybee was the emblem of the Barberini family, from which came Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini; d. 1644), who covered the city with them and helped make the bee a celebrated symbol of Catholicism.⁶ And is it just fancy that the old papal tiara was shaped like a beehive, like the symbol of the perfect society?

But the bee’s association with the faith runs far beyond the city of Rome. Indeed, the bee’s industriousness has long been held up as a Christian moral example: “The bee is more honored than the other animals,” Saint John Chrysostom preached in the 4th century, “not because she labors, but because she labors for others.”⁷ The “cells” in which monks live and pray in their monasteries are named in honor of the cells of the honeycomb. For the longest time, the Church required the candles used in her worship to be made of pure beeswax.⁸ There are also the strange stories of saints – Saint Ambrose and Saint Rita, for instance – being swarmed by bees and yet left unharmed because of their “holy sweetness” or their “honeyed-tongues.”

There’s an odd moment involving bees in the Book of Judges from the Old Testament. You’ll remember the story of Israel’s judge, Samson, and his incredible strength. As the story goes, so long as Samson’s hair was left uncut, he possessed enormous physical strength, becoming the terror of Israel’s enemies, especially the Philistines. In time, of course, his Philistine wife Delilah tricked him into revealing the secret and sold him out to his death.

Early in Samson’s life, though, when he was traveling along the road, we read about an extraordinary encounter: “Behold, a young lion roared against him … and he tore the lion asunder … [though] he had nothing in his hand.” Sometime later, walking the same route, we read that “he turned aside to see the carcass of the lion, and behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey. He scraped it out into his hands, and went on, eating as he went” (Jdg 14:5-9).

The story is admittedly strange and is rarely remarked upon. But it is strikingly reminiscent of a very ancient way of thinking about bees. Indeed, in the ancient world it was widely believed that, upon sacrificing an animal, a swarm of bees would be generated from the carcass. You can find this in writers like Ovid and Virgil and the idea was shot through with supernatural meaning.⁹ It was believed, in fact, that the very life of the animal was carried forward into the life of the bees. It was a way of “resurrecting” the animal and a way for the person offering the sacrifice to pray for their own resurrection. Are the bees in Samson’s story a symbol of his own longing for resurrection? Is this about, as one scholar put it, “passion for eternal life.”¹⁰

The notion that bees carry some spark of divinity or are somehow supernaturally significant is extremely old. It was commonly believed that bees were actually immortal. Their reemergence each spring was a reemergence from death. You can see this in ancient literature: the bees of Aesop’s fables, for instance, were understood to be immortal.¹¹ In Virgil’s Aeneid, the great epic about the founding of Rome, Aeneas visits the underworld and encounters Rome’s future inhabitants and heroes. They are yet-to-be-born souls who appear, Virgil tells us, as a vast field of bees, where “all the plain is murmurous with their humming.”¹²

This way of thinking has been carried over into Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, the bee has journeyed with God’s people through its entire history as some sort of eternally present figure. Let’s not forget that Israel’s longed-for Promised Land is a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3:8). 

The honey of the bee has long stood out as something like a mystical or sacred substance. Its sweetness has been thought of as a gift from another world, something like the ambrosia upon which the gods dined. People have also noticed its healing properties. In fact, contemporary studies have indicated its effectiveness with burn wounds and infections.¹³ Honey, moreover, never spoils – perfectly edible honey from millennia-old tombs has been discovered in Egypt – and so it is said to have something of eternity in it. 

Perhaps we can see all this hinted at in the Scriptures? In the woods one day, David’s friend Jonathan found honey dripping from the trees. Taking it to his lips, we read that his “eyes became bright.” Some translations say he was “enlightened” (1 Sam 14:27). Two books later, we see the child of Jeroboam taking sick and his mother racing to the prophet Ahijah with, among other things, honey so that he will be able to “see what shall happen to the child” (1 Kgs 14:3). 

In the Judeo-Christian imagination, there is something about honey that provides vision. Bees have been around for about 30 million years. It’s as if, as she journeys with God’s people, the bee is trying to get them to see. Indeed, through the bees, the Israelites can glimpse, far off down the generations, a land of milk and honey. They can see a restoration and a redemption. This phenomenon reaches its high point in the desert – as the Old is folding into the New, as the promise is becoming reality – where John the Baptist is preparing the way: “And his food was locusts and wild honey” (Mt 3:4). With John, the vision is complete. The Christ is here. The Promise is possessed. 

There is something of this, too, as I pray in the dark church at night – the tiny bees still trying to get me to see. There is something of this at the Vigil, as we all stand with our candles – “a solemn offering, the work of bees” – waiting for the Lord and waiting for new life.

1. William Shakespeare, The Life of Henry the Fifth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1.2.187-189.

2. See Haylie Swenson, “The Political Insect: Bees as an Early Modern Metaphor for Human Hierarchy,” Folger Shakespeare Library Blog, June 23, 2020, available here.

3. Not “democrats” like the political party – as in Democrats vs. Republicans – but democrats like the political system – as in Democrats vs. Monarchists. See Robert Krulwich, “Nature's Secret: Why Honey Bees Are Better Politicians Than Humans,” NPR, May 24, 2011, available here.

4. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi, (New American Library, 2003), XXXI.7-9.

5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, I.767-769.

6. See Shawn Tribe, “Rome and the Barberini Bees,” Liturgical Arts Journal, May 20, 2021, available here.

7. Saint John Chrysostom, “Homily 12,” On the Statues, §5.

8. One sometimes hears that, even today, altar candles need to be “51% beeswax.” This is not correct, at least in the United States. See the April 2018 Newsletter of the Committee on Divine Worship from the USCCB, “Composition of Candles for Use in the Liturgy.” Also see the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, §117 and 307.

9. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV; Virgil, Georgics, Book IV.

10. Mattat Adar Bunis, “Samson and the Bees as a Myth: An Anthropological Reading,” JSRNC 14, no. 3 (2020): 355.

11. See Bunis, “Samson and the Bees,” 358.

12. Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI.

13. See Jull AB, Cullum N, Dumville JC, Westby MJ, Deshpande S, Walker N, “Honey as a Topical Treatment for Wounds,” The Cochrane Library 3 (2015).