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10-26-2018 08:55 PM |
Oct 27th, 2018 : Telling the Bees
If you’re a CEO, or even if you just employ one or two people, the key to success is communication.
Bee keepers know the symbiotic relationship with the bees requires keeping them in the loop.
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While most common in the nineteenth century, the practice of “telling the bees” about significant life events endures, albeit in a different form, to the present day. The most pervasive and affecting depiction of this tradition can be found in the New England Quaker writer John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1858 poem “Telling the Bees.”
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The consequences of not telling the bees could be dire. Another Victorian biologist, Margaret Warner Morley, in her book The Honey-Makers (1899), cites a case in Norfolk where a man purchased a hive of bees at an auction. When the man returned home with them, the bees appeared very sickly. It occurred to their new owner that they hadn’t been properly put into mourning after the death of their former owner. He decided to drape the hive with black cloth, and soon after he did, the bees regained their health. There are also tales of entire bee colonies dying if the family failed to notify them of a death.
Throughout the nineteenth-century and well into the twentieth, there were reports of rural people who firmly believed in this tradition of telling the bees. There is even a report of bees brought to a funeral, presumably after being told of the death. In 1956, the AP reported a strange occurrence at the funeral of John Zepka, a beekeeper from the Berkshire Hills. As the funeral procession reached the grave, the mourners discovered swarms of bees hanging placidly from the ceiling of the tent “and clinging to floral sprays. They did not annoy the mourners—just remained immobile.” According to a New York Times dispatch from Adams, MA, published on July 16, 1956: “Nothing like it had ever been seen before.” This curious case seemed to confirm the need to “tell” the bees, further strengthening the conviction that there exists a mournful sympathy between bees and humans.
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