When the Queen or King of England dies, a to-do series is started. Before 10 days of official mourning, filled with ceremonial and miscellaneous work, the Prime Minister is given the code phrase “London Bridge has fallen” in a phone call to inform him of the death of the monarch. And the process begins.
Perhaps the strangest part of this process is informing the royal bees about the death of the queen.
As has been the case for centuries, the royal beekeeper wanders the bee hives on the grounds of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, placing black ribbons in the hives and notifying the bees that the Queen has passed away. Each hive is tapped and said, ‘The monarch is dead, but don’t go. Your new master will be a good master to you’ is whispered. This message is conveyed to them in English rather than the butt-swinging (aka rocking dances) favored by the bees. And Queen II. The same will be done after Elizabeth’s death.
Not just limited to the Royal family
Surprisingly, this tradition of “informing the bees” is not limited to the Royal Family, but is known as a long-standing beekeeping tradition in Europe. According to a superstition, after the death of a member of the owner’s family, bees need to be informed and “helped to grieve”.
“In Yorkshire, bees are even invited to the funeral,” writes the 1899 book “Honey Makers” on the subject, although they have little idea of the concept and their presence will only cause problems for the other attendees.
As a priest learned in the early 19th century, it was thought that if bees were not informed of the death of a family member (and sometimes events such as a wedding), they would die or produce less honey. As the priest relates to the author of a book on bees, “An ‘old woman’ in a congregation whose husband had recently died was about to mourn her bees when I dissuaded her from the act by showing her how foolish the idea was that the bee could understand anything about death.’ The following winter. The bees died in it.”
What is even more interesting is that this practice has also reached America. As one mountaineer living in the Carolinas at the end of the 19th century said, “You tap every bucket and say, ‘Lucy is dead’.”
As stated in the same book, in France, a piece of clothing belonging to the deceased is buried under the bees’ hive, and the bees of a deceased person are never sold or given away.
While not much is known about the origins of the practice, it is thought to derive from Celtic mythology, where the sight of a bee after death is a sign that the spirit has left the body. The practice began to wane after its heyday in Western Europe and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. But apparently it continues in England with all its weirdness…
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