Bees, hives and honey etc: symbolism, significance and refer

Has Samantha Bee been mentioned yet?



SOURCE: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Bee

Bee is a really unusual family name...

Bees in drink advertisements

Ardent Craft Ales’s logo was featured elsewhere because of royal and Masonic connections.

Here it is again, surrounded by others with bee references, with the Blackheath Meadery one in a larger version:

Bees in The Wizard of Oz again

Full details of the deleted scene:

"I'll use you for a bee-hive!"

During shooting, a scene immediately following If I Only Had a Heart was filmed. Following the Wicked Witch's threatening the trio, a swarm of animated bees would fly out of Tin-Man, the Witch fullfilling her threat of turning him into a bee-hive. As Dorothy runs for cover, the bees try to sting Tin-Man, but bend their stingers on him instead, and fly away in defeat. As Dorothy returns, she discovers a bee on her arm, and the Tin-Man kills it as he tries to get it off of her. He shows his true emotions as the following exchange occurs:

TIN MAN: Oh, see - I killed it. Oh, I killed that poor little honey bee!
DOROTHY: Oh-oh-
TIN MAN: It's only a man without a heart who could do a thing like that. Poor little bee.
DOROTHY: Oh, there, there. Don't cry. There. As a matter of fact, that's just an old drone bee, and it would have died anyway.
[SHE WIPES AWAY HIS TEARS.]
TIN MAN: Yes?
DOROTHY: You put it out of its misery.
TIN MAN: Oh.
DOROTHY: It's just that the Witch is so wicked. I don't think you two ought to come with me because you'll get into trouble.
SCARECROW: Oh, you don't think we're going to stand by and let her get away with fireballs and bees, do you?
TIN MAN: No, sir!
SCARECROW: No, sir!

lostmediawiki.com/The_Wizard_of_Oz_-_deleted_scenes_(partially_found_footage_of_musical_fantasy_film;_1939)



"Haley, Bolger, and Garland in an early promo shot, set during the deleted bee-hive scene."

The horror of the bees

From aletheia :

“Biblical references to bees are always negative whereas references to honey are generally positive.”

This is strange, as bees are generally portrayed elsewhere as very positive. They are our friends.

The only other exception I can find is in some horror stories and films.

The film posters look ridiculous, rather like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

Here are some examples:

Bees and ants evolved from wasps, as I understand it. So, closer than you think!

I hadn’t heard of Phenomena. I read a few reviews and it sounds much too gruesome for me!

Maurice Maeterlinck and the bees

Belgian poet & playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (MM) wrote a book called The Life of the Bee. It is a bit tedious to read, but this extract is interesting:

“They have a very nice sense of proportion, and of the space required for the movement of bodies. In the regions where the hideous death's-head sphinx, the acherontia atropos, abounds, they construct little pillars of wax at the entrance of the hive, so restricting the dimension as to prevent the passage of the nocturnal marauder's enormous abdomen.”

So bees can be doorkeepers and build entrance barriers?

Strange behaviour by Buddhist bees

Maybe the Bible is not the only place where bees are not always friends to man. This is from 2012, but seems worth putting on here as it is a very rare occurrence:

“More than 70 Buddhist monks were hospitalized in northern Thailand Saturday (June 23) after being attacked by a giant swarm of bees, according to news reports.

It was unclear what provoked the bees, which were from hives kept at the monks' temple and had never posed a threat previously. Bees from several of the hives attacked the monks while they were sweeping the grounds of the Luang Worawihan temple in Chiang Mai province. Of the 76 monks who had to be rushed to the hospital with stings, 19 were in serious condition and six were in a coma, according to the Deccan Herald…

According to Thomas Seeley, an apiologist at Cornell University who studies swarm intelligence, the species involved in the attack was most likely the giant honey bee, Apis dorsata, which is common in Thailand. "It has been described as the most ferocious stinging insect on earth, but it attacks only when disturbed.”

www.livescience.com/34028-giant-bee-swarm-attack.html

No love and peace there then.

Killer bees in real life

I thought that killer bees existed primarily in horror stories and films, but there are many real-life cases:

“A 22-year-old Colombian woman has died after falling off a cliff while fleeing a swarm of killer bees.

Paula Andrea Ramos Molina, a forestry engineer, had been part of a team carrying out an assessment in a rural area of the central Colombian district of Caldas. Ms Ramos Molina and three of her colleagues accidentally dislodged a bee hive and were immediately attacked by a swarm of furious insects.

They quickly divided into pairs and as Ms Ramos Molina and her colleague fled the killer bees, they fell off a cliff. Ms Ramos Molina broke her neck in the fall and died instantly. Her colleague, who has not been named, suffered severe injuries and multiple bee stings and remains in a 'grave condition' in hospital.

Killer bees, also known as 'Africanised bees', are a hybrid of the European honey bee and the larger and more aggressive African honey bee.

Killer bees gather in swarms of up to 41,000 insects and have been known to chase people for up to a quarter of a mile.

Since their introduction to Brazil, they are believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 people as well as numerous horses and cows.”

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6155453/Woman-falls-death-cliff-fleeing-swarm-killer-bees.html

Bees have killed over 1,000 people in Brazil? This is much worse than the case involving injured Buddhist monks.

There is a symbolic drawing that relates to the Rosicrucian Order which features bees.

Adorned with the words "Dat rosa mel apibus" which means "The rose gives honey to the bees".

The rose with the thorny cross below, as represented in this drawing, has an important association with Venus.

Putting DAT ROSA MEL APIBUS into a numerology calculator yields 33 for consonants in both Pythagorean & Chaldean systems.

Hello Unseen!

Its true meaning escapes me but the seven petals in the outer ring of the rose seem to have a relation to there being seven major precepts within their occult doctrine.

Noël Fielding recently appeared on the TV show The Great British Bake Off wearing this bumblebee-themed jumper.

The Mirror deemed it significant enough to run a story on it which referenced doppelgängers.

www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/bake-fans-seek-out-noel-13229545

Texan killer bee statue

I have heard the expression “Everything’s bigger in Texas” and have found a good example:

“The city of Hidalgo, Texas where the first Africanized bees in the U.S. were identified built a larger than life statue of the "Killer bee" on wheels which is still brought out for festivals and parades.“

strathconabeekeepers.blogspot.com/2012/09/killer-bees.html