Also called Informing the bees, Bee mourning
When someone in a beekeeping family died, married or was born, a member of the household went to the hives, knocked, and told the bees the news. If the bees were not told, people believed they would leave or die.
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Take care: Approach hives calmly and in daylight, with a veil if you are not used to bees. Anyone with a bee-sting allergy should tell the bees from a distance or ask the beekeeper to do it.
Whittier's poem describes a young man coming home to find a servant draping each hive with black and singing to the bees, and so learning that his sweetheart has died. Tammy Horn records that New Hampshire households told the bees in rhyme. The poem made the custom famous in America.
In some areas the hives were lifted or turned at the moment the coffin left the house, sometimes so their entrances faced the home. Families also brought the bees a share of the funeral food and drink. The point was the same: the bees were part of the household and had to take part in its grief.
When Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, royal beekeeper John Chapple went to the hives at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, tied black ribbons on them, knocked, and told the bees their mistress had died and that King Charles would be a good master. The story drew worldwide attention to a custom many thought had died out.
Bees were treated across Europe as near-human members of the household: clean, orderly and easily offended. The custom of telling them family news is recorded in England by the 17th century and was common through the 19th in Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and New England. Bees were said to resent being left out; if not told of a death, they might swarm away, stop making honey or die, which was a serious loss for a family that depended on the hives.
Folklorists have suggested many roots, from older beliefs that bees carried messages to the dead to the Christian image of the hive as an ideal family. The custom lasted longest in quiet rural places and among beekeepers who simply kept doing it. The 2022 royal telling brought it back into the news, and some beekeepers in England and New England still keep their hives informed of a passing.
On Midsummer night Slavic villagers gathered healing herbs, floated flower wreaths on rivers, leapt over bonfires and searched the forest for the fern that blooms only at midnight. Herbs picked that night were dried and kept as protection all year.
On Twelfth Night, villagers in the English cider country gather around the oldest apple tree, soak toast in cider for the robins, pour cider on the roots, sing to the tree and make a racket to drive off bad spirits so the orchard bears well.
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