The Bee Priestess
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When the pandemic began, I was terrified that I would lose my job or catch the virus, so I took comfort in an urban forest. I live in a peculiar little borderland in Los Angeles, where a working-class Koreatown neighborhood butts up against the mansions of Hancock Park, and to calm myself, I would slip out of my home between Zoom meetings and homeschooling sessions and walk along the shadiest streets. I touched the bark of ash and pine and camphor trees; I watched the flights of crows and hummingbirds. One day I heard a Cooper’s hawk making her nesting call, a very unhawklike chit-chit-chit-chit-chit, and for the next several weeks I studied the rat tails and songbird legs that littered the ground beneath a tangle of twigs thirty feet above me. On the quiet sidewalks outside rich peoples’ homes, the background fear of the pandemic would recede, giving me pockets of something resembling peace.
It was on one of those walks that I first found the bees. I noticed movement at my feet one day, and paused to watch a couple of bees fly into a hole at the base of a camphor tree. I knelt, delighted at my find, and watched a steady stream of bees landing and launching, hovering as they adjusted speed and trajectory, crawling in and out of the crevices behind the exposed roots and fallen leaves. One of the few things I love more than watching bees forage is finding a honeybee hive, imagining the hidden city inside.
Almost all honey bees are female; males, or drones, perform precisely one task in their entire lifetime, and that task ends mid-flight when their penis comes loose and hangs from the body of their airborne queen. The hive is a massive community of sisters: sisters scouting out flowers, gathering pollen, building and repairing comb, and feeding their larval siblings. Even the queen herself is the sister of the workers, if she’s young enough.
For the next few months, the hive became one of the stops on my walk, along with the hawk nest. I soon learned, though, that I wasn’t the only person who had noticed the hive on my Covid walks. One day, I found a note taped to the wall by the tree: STOP STUFFING GASOLINE SOAKED RAGS IN THE BEE NEST. I peered into the hive, alarmed, but breathed easier when I saw that there were still a few bees coming in and out. I didn’t know anything about bees, but I hoped the colony could bounce back.
A few days later, though, their numbers had diminished even more, and another, more frantic note told people to walk on the other side of the street if they were allergic. For a few days, I couldn’t visit the tree; my workplace had bought a Zoom subscription, which meant more staff meetings. But when I made it back out to Hancock Park, I anxiously sought out the bees, and what I saw broke me. The notes had been ripped off the wall and the hive plastered over with mud. The bodies of hundreds of bees lay scattered on the pavement.
One hive can contain up to 80,000 workers, and those workers pollinate countless plants, which form the foundation of every ecosystem in Los Angeles and beyond. The hive was destroyed, I should mention, around the same time that my building’s homeowners’ association destroyed a garden I’d planted in the back alley and the Bobcat Fire, one of California’s now annual massive wildfires, decimated the Angeles National Forest. Every day, it seemed, I had to watch the people around me destroy plants and animals with a determination I seldom see humans apply to anything else. Adding to those atrocities was the Covid death toll, which was approaching a hundred thousand — a testament to the US’s utter disregard for life. My grief for everyone and everything dying around me felt like a dream in which you try to scream and yell, you try to release the frantic rage inside you, but only a hoarse croak emerges.
The ancient Greek and Roman world contained multiple goddesses who fell under what archaeologists call a “mother goddess type:” a goddess associated with fertility and the natural world. Many of these goddesses, including Artemis and Demeter, were closely associated with bees; their surviving iconography includes numerous images of bees, and the priestesses who served them were called Melissai, Greek for “bees.” I think I vaguely assumed, at one point, that the Melissai literally worshiped bees, but the name seems to have been metaphorical. Bees were associated with purity, celibacy, and obedience, traits that were expected of priestesses in certain orders. The bee was also closely associated with the fecundity of the natural world: a field awash with flowers, or a garden bursting with food.
Even aside from the associations that we know date from antiquity, the bee is a thoroughly fitting symbol of the Great Goddess. The entrance to the hive is womb-like, secreted away in tree trunks and other hollows. Inside, where no light penetrates, the workers communicate by touch, smell, and vibration as they build their comb, make their honey, and tend to their brood. Within the hubbub, the eternally pregnant queen lays egg after egg after egg, a seemingly immortal figure to the generations of workers who maintain the hive around her. As classicist Rachel D. Carlson notes, the honey bee is like Persephone, flying from the black depths of the hive to the bright blooming meadow and back again. She is both chthonic and celestial, equally at home underground and in the air.
Humans have been collecting honey since at least the neolithic era, and it predates wine as an offering to the gods. In addition to its well-known culinary and medicinal value, its sweetness has been likened to wisdom and divine love in many religious traditions. Saint Francis de Sales was struck by the strange alchemy of the honey-making process, seeing the bees’ ability to transform the bitter juices of herbs into honey as a metaphor for a life of spiritual devotion. In Yiddish class, my teacher told us that, in the old days, yeshiva boys learned the aleph-bes by licking the shapes of letters made from honey, a ritual that emphasized the sweet nourishment of learning.
It seems to have been mainly the bees’ production of honey, rather than the bees themselves, that our ancestors saw as sacred. Even with their keen observation, they didn’t know how deeply connected bees are to what we recognize as the natural world. Bees evolved alongside the first angiosperms, or flowering plants, and each life form nudged the other along its evolutionary path, as flowers grew bigger and showier to attract pollinators and bees continually adapted to the flowers’ changing shapes. Simply put, without bees, flowers wouldn’t exist, at least not in their present forms.
These days, with phenomena like Colony Collapse Disorder making headlines, defenders of bees highlight the insects’ crucial work as pollinators. It’s strange to think that our ancestors took pollination for granted and considered honey precious, when now the exact opposite is true. Even I take honey for granted sometimes, casually grabbing bottles of it off the supermarket shelf to squeeze onto bread for my children. I do try to remember to say a prayer of thanks when I use it, but I know that a short prayer, rattled off while the kids wreak havoc in the next room, doesn’t do much to make honey precious again.
Once, my neighbor found a single bee on his patio and came to warn me that there were bees loose in our neighborhood. “I mean, of course I killed it,” he told me. Of course. I had thought that everyone knew not to kill bees on sight, but that was naive. I had forgotten that I inhabited a bubble in an otherwise indifferent culture. Surely my neighbor had at least one bottle of honey in his kitchen; perhaps his Hebrew teacher had even had him lick a honeyed aleph when he was young. The jacaranda tree next to our building seethed with bees every spring. What would my neighbor do if he ever discovered it? I took a bleak solace in the fact that he would likely never look closely enough to see.
Many of my neighbors, over the years, have felt comfortable in a hierarchy, no matter where they find themselves within it. Everyone in that building loathed our landlady, but when my husband and I tried to start a tenants’ association to push back against her, no one came to the meeting. Now that we live in a condo, I’ve seen neighbors escape bullying by joining the building’s board of directors, only to bully their neighbors in turn. These situations are petty microcosms of broader problems — abusive workplaces, oppressive governments, the genocidal howl of capitalism and white supremacy — which are all seamless continuations of the violent systems that preceded them.
For generations in Europe, honeybees were used as a symbol of monarchy, on the belief that the queen was a leader who ruled over her workers. Now, though, hive dynamics are understood to be a collection of specialized roles in a more horizontal — one might even say, at the risk of anthropomorphism, democratic — arrangement. After the workers create a new queen by fertilizing a larva with royal jelly, that queen performs one mating flight, after which she lays eggs for the rest of her life and can never leave the hive again. The workers, unable to reproduce, instead enjoy freedom of movement and the warmth of sunlight. Decisions such as where to forage or which site to select for a new hive are made collectively, with scouts reporting their finds to the group, which in turn decides what to do. The queen isn’t a monarch in any human sense, but rather one individual with a very particular function.
It would be very easy for me to say, here, that humans should try to be more like bees. But the human mind is organized very differently than that of the bee, and I won’t claim that we can solve our problems by simply pretending to be another species. Octavia Butler elegantly pinpointed the peculiar nature of our minds in her novel Dawn: we are both intelligent and hierarchical, and these two traits are fundamentally incompatible. It’s worth asking which human civilizations have most successfully enabled intelligence to rein in hierarchy.
Humans can’t become bees, but we can follow a path that bees have laid out. Bees originally evolved from predatory wasps that, for whatever reason, decided to stop killing, and that is why we now have daffodils and poppies and foxgloves and jasmine. A philosophy of nonviolence led to the joyful riot of a planet full of flowers. Based on what I know about Indigenous cultures — namely, the immense power of simply acknowledging other lives, human and nonhuman, as important — a similar outcome doesn’t seem impossible for those of us who were raised within industrial capitalism. Whether we can manage it before the culmination of the mass extinction event we’ve begun is another matter.
Over time, the mud gradually fell off of the hive entrance, but the hole remained vacant. Quarantine dragged on, the summer tipping into fall, the urban forest struggling through heat waves and staticky Santa Ana winds.
There is a curious bit of folklore, which has made its way into some myths, that bees do not reproduce sexually, but rather spontaneously arise from the carcasses of bulls. In reality, when bees seek to form a new hive, they leave their colony and swarm. We think of swarms of bees as aggressive, predatory super-organisms, but in reality they’re quite docile — so much so that beekeepers can literally scoop a swarm into an empty hive with their bare hands. With no honeycombs to keep up their strength and no hive to protect, the bees quietly cling to whatever perch they happen upon until their scouts find a site for the new colony.
Did anyone notice the swarm that found the empty hive in the camphor tree? Or did the tree itself seem to birth the bees, little priestesses emerging from their mother’s womb? All I know is that one day, when I paused by the tree for what had become a sullen little mourning ritual, I saw bees flying in and out. Amidst the grim slog of the pandemic and the unrelenting trauma of climate change and white supremacy, a small miracle had occurred. The colony had been reborn.
A new note appeared on the wall: If you do not like the bees, please use the other side of the street. Thank you. Soon, others followed. On a heart-shaped piece of red paper: Thank you for protecting the bees! On bee-themed stationary: We walk every morning and dearly love seeing the bees. It fills our hearts with happiness, and is a wonderful way to begin the day! Thank you! Someone contributed an entire page of bee jokes, including Which bee gives you a second chance? The Plan Bee. The page included a drawing of a smiling bee, and, of course, a love note to the hive and a thank-you to their protectors.
That was the first few days. The notes multiplied over the next month. I found flowers laid in front of the hive as an offering and wondered if they’d been put there by a friend of mine, a fellow witch who lives in the neighborhood. I knew most of the residents who left notes most likely didn’t identify as nature-worshipers or animists; rather, the love they poured out to the bees was a product of the simple compassion that resides in all of us, even those of us indoctrinated by cultures of death, if we give kinship space to thrive. The notes were both a shield for the bees — what monster would plug up the hive in the midst of so much support? — and a balm for my heart.
Even so, I knew the hive’s safety wasn’t assured, and the truce was fragile. Sure enough, the following July, one year after the first attack, the hive was gassed and blocked again. Some bees survived, but as I write this essay, the colony is greatly diminished. Someone in the neighborhood did a bit of research and found that years ago, the hive was mistakenly reported to the city as a hornet’s nest, and it is on a yearly extermination schedule. Now the notes around the tree had a new addition: a sheet with the names and of several city officials to contact to have the hive removed from the list.
Of course, even if we manage to save this particular hive, the situation is even more complicated than I’ve let on. Honey bees aren’t native to California or even the US. What effects are they having on native bee populations, or the plants that rely on native bees for pollination? But such questions feel trite compared to the catastrophe hurtling toward us. In my neighborhood, planters are torn out and replaced with concrete ledges; herbicide is lavishly poured into the soil around sterile cultivars. The temperature climbs higher every year; the weather is more erratic; the wildfires and heat waves are increasingly out of control. According to the United Nations’ Sixth Assessment Report on climate change, climate disasters will continue to worsen over the next 30 years no matter what we do. There is no normal anymore. Even if we’re able to halt climate change in its tracks, the world we know is ending.
I want to be a Melissa, a priestess of the Great Goddess.
I am well aware that anyone, with even the most half-hearted and fleeting interest in a spiritual modality, can proclaim themselves a priestess of this or that. Los Angeles teems with crystal priestesses and life coach priestesses and interdimensional cosmic ascension priestesses. I am aware that there are self-anointed priestesses who have practiced for ten minutes or thirty years and have little to contribute to their communities or to the object of their devotion. So let me explain what I mean: I want to do the authentic, honest, and useful work needed most by the earth, our goddess, our mother. I want to know her language so that I understand her when she tells me what action is needed, and when. I want to fan my wings to protect her from heat; I want to use my sting against those who would destroy her. Melissa is not a threshold that a practitioner can cross, but rather a lifelong path to which we can dedicate our imperfect, often failing selves. Where are you on that path? Will you walk it with me?
Last spring, before I went back to work in person, before the city arrived with their gasoline-soaked rags, I visited the bees to find a bustling hive entrance, each worker’s pollen sacs fat with treasure. Now, inside the secret heartwood chambers, the survivors make their honey, tend to their brood, and dream of an uncertain future. Within them and around them, the Goddess and the land dream as well.
Many thanks to Lila Amanita for her help with this essay.
Sources
Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism.The Book of Symbols. Cologne: Taschen, 2010.
Butler, Octavia. Lilith’s Brood (reprint edition). New York City: Grand Central Publishing, 2000.
Carlson, Rachel D. The Honey Bee and Apian Imagery in Classical Literature. PhD diss. University of Washington, 2015. Accessed August 10, 2021. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/33129
Elderkin, G.W. “The Bee of Artemis.” The American Journal of Philology 60, no. 2 (1939): 203-213.
Fountain, Henry. “5 takeaways from the major new U.N. climate report.” New York Times, August 9, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/un-climate-report-takeaways.html
Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. New York City: Harper & Row, 1989.
Wilson-Rich, Noah. The Bee: A Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
ASA WEST
is the author of Five Principles of Green Witchcraft (Gods and Radicals Press, 2020). Her online course of the same name begins on September 11, 2021. Her writing has appeared in Witches and Pagans Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, and other outlets, and you can find her at https://linktr.ee/theredtailwitch.