St. Valentine and the Bees

We've covered bees and beekeeping a few times over the years, and honey has had its own entry, but I don't think we've mentioned why St. Valentine is considered the patron saint of beekeepers. Since we know so few facts about his life, we have to speculate.

It might have something to do with the fact that he became the patron of lovers and affianced couples. This is because he was accused of secretly performing Christian marriages at a time when Emperor Claudius Gothicus oppressed Christians in Rome. Since honey was considered an aphrodisiac, it became connected to lovers. We even have the word "honeymoon" to describe the period immediately following marriage when all is sweet. Love connected to honey connected to bees might have been enough.

A legend about Valentine—and most likely created later to reinforce his connection to lovers—is that he was a beekeeper himself. In The Golden Legend of Jacob Voragine, there is the following:

When Saint Valentine was brought in an house in prison, then he prayed to God, saying: Lord Jesu Christ very God, which art very light, enlumine this house in such wise that they that dwell therein may know thee to be very God. And the provost said: I marvel me that thou sayest that thy God is very light, and nevertheless, if he may make my daughter to hear and see, which long time hath been blind, I shall do all that thou commandest me, and shall believe in thy God. Saint Valentine anon put him in prayers, and by his prayers the daughter of the provost received again her sight, and anon all they of the house were converted.

This was compiled in the 13th century, a thousand years after Valentine. The Golden Legend was one of the most popular works for a couple centuries, and no doubt inspired many to embellish what they learned about saints' lives. One result was the link between Valentine and bees.

The later legend says that Valentine himself was a beekeeper, gently caring for them and talking to and blessing them with his prayers. The legend extends the story shared above, saying that the provost's daughter loved bees (tricky, when one is blind). This legend says that valentine talked to her about how to care for bees, training her to be a beekeeper, and she eventually regained her sight during this process.

Supposedly, some beekeepers will celebrate 14 February by placing wax candles and honey on the altar.

A casual search about the origin of the word "honeymoon" often turns up the idea that it started in the Middle Ages. That makes its origin fair game for this blog, and we will look into that and report back tomorrow.

Early Irish Law

Early Irish law was called Brehon Law, a system of civil (not criminal) rules, some of which survived until the 17th century when they were replaced with British laws.

It was called Brehon Law because it was administered by Brehons (from Old Irish breithem ("judge"), successors to Celtic Druids who acted as arbitrators in disputes, and questions of compensation and conduct.

Brehon Law recognized equality between sexes and concern for the environment. It was progressive in that it promoted restitution rather than punishment after wrongdoing. Even homicide and bodily harm were recompensed according to an established scale of value, similar to the Anglo-Saxon wergild. Payments were made to the family, not to a civil court. Capital punishment was not part of Brehon Law, unlike many other legal systems before and since, and revenge and retaliation were strongly discouraged.

The clan was the most important social unit, and the property inhabited by that clan was treated as communal when it came to resources such as bee hives, fruit trees, and water mills. The seventh-century Coibnes wisci thairidne ("The Kinship of Conducted Water") discusses the importance of water and why it belongs to all.* Land itself was rarely sold; the highest-ranking lord "rented out" not the land but the right to graze cattle on it.

The manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (sample shown above) offer an extensive look at this early legal system. This particular illustration is part of a discussion of Bechbretha ("bee judgments"). Honeybees were an important part of the economy: people needed honey, and monasteries needed large amounts of beeswax. Bees were protected; bee possession was sacrosanct; but if you came across a swarm of bees (a mass clinging together on a branch, waiting for the secret apian signal to fly and find a new home), you could claim it for your own and remove it for your use.

The Anglo-Norman Invasion in the 1170s started to replace Brehon Law with English Law, but Brehon Law saw a revival in the 1300s as intermarriage between the Anglo-Norman lords and Irish led to Irish-oriented noble families.

Women in marriage had more agency than in Roman Catholic countries at the time, and I'll go into marriage and divorce tomorrow.

*Even in the 20th century, James Joyce has Leopold Bloom ask "How can you own water really?" in Ulysses.

Bee poetry?

I remember the character Queenie in the TV show "Lark Rise to Candleford" (based on the partially autobiographical books by Flora Thompson) speaking to several hives of bees, saying "Bees, bees, your master's dead; I must be your mistress now." The need was to explain to the bees that the person maintaining the hive was gone so that they could mourn properly and then attach to a new owner, not just fly away to seek a new home. The illustration here is "The bee friend" by Hans Thoma (1839-1924). He is speaking to his bees, because tradition holds that the bees must be informed of important events.

Bees were important for wax and honey, and a hive/colony could be kept going for years, with a strong bond developing between the family and the bees. You would not want the bees to have a reason to "swarm" and leave, so keeping them "in the loop" was important. Besides just "telling the bees," you could use a spoken charm to try to keep them.

One such charm was the Lorsch Bee Blessing, written down (we think) in the 9th century in Old High German and used to keep the bees from leaving. Translated, it says:

Christ, the bee swarm is out here!
Now fly, you my animal, come.
In the Lord's peace, in God's protection,
come home in good health.

Sit, sit bee.
The command to you from the Holy Mary.
You have no vacation;
Don't fly into the woods;

Neither should you slip away from me.
Nor escape from me.
Sit completely still.
Do God's will.

There also exists "For a Swarm of Bees," an Anglo-Saxon charm intended to prevent the bees from swarming and going to a new location.

Settle down, victory-women, sink to earth,
never be wild and fly to the woods.
Be as mindful of my welfare,
as is each man of border and of home.

Clearly each poem/charm indicates how important a thriving hive was for the person needing the wax and honey.

The "victory-women" of the first line of "For a Swarm of Bees" is curious. The Anglo-Saxon word is sigewif  and Jacob Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales) and other scholars think it may be drawing a poetic comparison to the valkyries of Norse myth. Perhaps the bees are compared to valkyries because of their weapon (sting) and the way they ride to battle (swarm)?

Speaking of Valkyries, I mentioned one once when discussing the real historical figure portrayed in the 2013 TV show The Vikings. I think the valkyries need a little more explanation.

Honey

Sugar cane was cultivated thousands of years ago—in Southeast Asia; mass cultivation and importation to Europe was not available in the Middle Ages. But Europe had honey.

Honey can sweeten food.

Honey is a preservative.

Honey can be used in medicine.

But there were also more...creative uses.

For instance, a peasant working on a manor could pay his rent in beeswax and honey.

At least one late medieval manual tells us Jewish children would learn their letters by, once having written the letters on a slate, covering the slate with honey. "The child then licked them so that the words of the Torah might be 'as sweet as honey'." (No reports exist on the efficacy of this pedagogical method.)

Manuals had differing recipes for mead, but one suggests to crush the honeycombs by hand or pestle (and mortar), strain the honey, mix it with water in a ratio of 1:4, let it sit for three days, then boil until it is at the concentration you prefer. It was then strained through linen and allowed to ferment. Mead was very popular, and so common that in 1015 in the city of Meissen, Germany, mead was used to put out a fire because the town had more mead at hand than water. This would have required a lot of honey available for the brewing.

Regarding its medicinal use: the Romans used it in medicinal concoctions, mostly for flavoring, but after the fall of the Roman Empire very little is written about honey's uses in medicine. Its antibacterial effects were not demonstrated until 1892 by a Dutch scientist.

I've got a few more things to say regarding bees themselves next time, and then we'll turn to something else.

Bee-keeping

The value of honey was no doubt discovered long before human beings started keeping written records. The Egyptians were maintaining bees as far back as 2450 BCE. In the Middle Ages, bees were seen as a source of not only honey, but also wax for candles wanted by the church and the aristocracy. They had other methods of lighting, such as tallow and rushlights, but wax candles were the best. 

Many people kept bees for these purposes, but the practice was so common that there was no need to explain it, and so the "rules" of beekeeping are scarce. The Geoponika, a 20-volume Byzantine collection of agricultural knowledge from the 900s includes "of the management of bees" in book 15.

The bee is the wisest and cleverest of all animals and the closest to man in intelligence; its works is truly divine and of the greatest use to mankind. Its social life resembles that of the best regulated cities. In their excursions bees follow a leader and obey instructions. They bring back sticky secretions from flowers and trees and spread them like ointment on their floors and doorways. Some are employed in making honey and some in other tasks. The bee is extremely clean, settling on nothing that is bad-smelling or impure;

Initial beekeeping was finding the trees the bees themselves had used and watching them. Holes would be bored, or even small wooden doors installed, to give access to the honey inside and to be able to seal up the hive against inclement weather. Once humans decided to keep the bees closer, they built hives of any material available: clay, wicker, straw, wood. Some documents warn against stone and clay, because the summer heat would make them unbearable. Pliny the Elder mentions hives made from horn and translucent stone, but there is no evidence that any hives made like that ever existed.

Skeps—domes of straw with a small hole—became common in the 14th century. They were easy to make, but to get at the wax and honey you needed to disturb the bees. Another problem with skeps was that they were small and easily stolen. Wax and honey were that important. We know the wax was for candles, but honey had lots of uses.

We will go into that next.