Bee Messengers........a Synchronicity

I've been delighted by this synchronicity.

Above is a small swarm of bees that suddenly appeared on a sagebush literally by my front gate.  A swarm can be when a hive is disrupted, or when a new queen is born and part of the hive will leave with her to found a new hive, so the bee ball above has a queen inside, which all the workers are carefully keeping warm.  This is not a good time of year to swarm, and since the bees have been here for about 4 days, and it is winter without a lot of flowers to forage as well as going below freezing tonight, I am having a beekeeper come to relocate the swarm and queen, as there is a danger they will freeze.  

What a wonderful message they delivered me.  I'm going to thank the bees for many things, among them for raising my spirits.  Because just a few days ago I began work on a (not finished yet) mask for a woman who requested a BEE PRIESTESS mask, a mask for the MELISSAE, the ancient bee priestesses of Greece.    I've also been talking a lot about being  "pollinators" for culture..........how just like bees, we are all needed for the flowering of a better, more just, more inspired culture.  Especially now, which seems to be a mantra I hear from virtually everyone I know.  But it's a mantra that has to be recited over and over - we need to rise to the best of our abilities to counter the regression, ignorance, and hatread that has arisen.

Without the bees, no nourishment, no flowering.  Without creative and generous souls, the same.  Like the bees, we have a job to do.  And there are the bees by golly............

Bees have always been magical creatures throughout many cultures. Think of how our ancestors must have perceived them, and their miraculous honey, which would have been a great luxury.  In old England honey wine, Mead, was reserved as a special celebatory drink for special occasions - that's where the term "honey moon" came from, a month's supply of magical mead was given to the new couple to encourage love and fertility.

In ancient Greece there were the Mellisae, who no doubt were also bee keepers,  and many myths of the Goddess include bees, the Queen Bee, and the creation of honey.  Also the Semitic name "Deborah" or "Devorah" means "Bee", and its origins may also go back to a time when there were women who were Bee priestesses.  

Bronze Age Bee Goddess

Reciprocity, the sense of intimacy with all the other lives and evolutions and intrinsic Spirits of Place  all around us..........I loved the movie "THE SECRET  LIFE OF BEES", where Queen Latifah explains to her young apprentice that it's important to just love the bees.  That "everyone needs love".  As the founders of  Findhorn demonstrated - there's a conversation  going on all the time, or there should be.

In New England there has long been a tradition called  "Telling the Bees", in which a death in a family farm, or among beekeepers,  is "told to the bees" so they will not be upset by the loss, or can participate, perhaps, in the remembrance, a folk custom that remembers as well that bees are "part of the family".

Well, I'm going back to work on that mask.