Bee symbolism
In ancient Egypt bees were said to come from the tears of the sun god Re. English folk custom tells the bees when someone in the family dies; Napoleon chose the bee as an imperial emblem, and Manchester and Utah use the bee and the beehive for industry.
Meaning
The bee has official meanings as well as folk ones. Napoleon chose it in 1804 as an emblem of his empire, Manchester has used the worker bee as its symbol for nearly two hundred years, and Utah made the beehive its state emblem in 1959. In English folk belief the bees are part of the household and must be told of a death, and in the Swiss Engadine they were believed to carry the souls of the dead.
Origin and history
An Egyptian papyrus written around 300 BCE tells how bees began: “The god Re wept, and the tears from his eyes fell on the ground and turned into a bee.” The entomologist Gene Kritsky, who quotes it, says bees were sacred in Egypt as a gift from Re; the oldest honeybee hieroglyph goes back to just before 3000 BCE, and at Sais the temple of Neith was called the house of the bee.
Telling the bees
Telling the bees was once common across most of England, Elizabeth Mary Wright wrote in 1913. When the head of the house or a member of the family died, the bees had to be told, or they would leave their hives and never return, or else all die. The telling came just before the funeral left the house or as the procession started, or on the Welsh Border in the middle of the night, and it was always whispered: “Bees, bees, bees, your master is dead, and you must work for…”, naming the new owner. The hives were put into mourning with black crape. In Devonshire it was believed that if the bees were not told, another of the household would die within the year. In Kentucky, Daniel and Lucy Thomas recorded in 1920, someone must go out and whisper the death of the head of the house to the bees, or they will leave or die.
Bees as souls
Dyer’s The Ghost World (1893) quotes an old tradition that “the bees alone of all animals descended from Paradise”. In the Engadine in Switzerland, he wrote, it was believed that the souls of the dead leave the world and return to it as bees, and bees were thought messengers of death.
Omens and dreams
The Kentucky collection reads bees as signs. A honey-bee flying before you means a letter, a yellow honey-bee is good luck and a black one a sign of death, counting your hives kills the bees, and selling a hive is bad luck. Wright adds from England that it is unlucky to sell bees or to hive a swarm after nightfall. To dream of bees at work, in Kentucky, means good luck.
Napoleon’s bees
When Napoleon’s Council of State debated emblems for the new empire in June 1804, the Fondation Napoléon records, Cambacérès argued for bees, since France was a republic with a head, like a hive. The bee, “symbol of immortality and resurrection”, was chosen to link the new dynasty to the origins of France: golden bees, in fact cicadas, had been found in 1653 at Tournai in the tomb of Childeric I, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, and were taken for the oldest emblem of the French kings. The imperial mantle was scarlet velvet spread with bees.
The Manchester bee
The worker bee has been Manchester’s symbol for nearly 200 years, CBC News reported, going back to the Industrial Revolution, when people called the city’s factories “beehives”. After the bombing at the Manchester Arena that killed 22 people, tattoo artists offered to tattoo the bee and give the fee to a fund for the victims, and it became a sign of the city’s unity. Five years later, ITV News Granada found people still coming in for the bee tattoo, many of them not from Manchester, and one tattooist said that anyone who sees your bee “will tell you where they were on that day.”
The beehive in Utah
Utah made the beehive its official emblem on 4 March 1959. The Utah State Library says Utahns connect it with industry, the state motto, and with the pioneer virtues of thrift and perseverance; the beehive was chosen for the provisional State of Deseret in 1848, and its origin as a symbol goes back to Mormon scripture. The Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon calls the bee and hive symbols of industry in Freemasonry too (Beehive).
Related animals
Dyer tells the soul beliefs about bees alongside those about the Butterfly symbolism.
See also
Butterfly symbolism, Beehive, Dragonfly symbolism, Moth symbolism, Ladybug symbolism, Spider symbolism.
Sources
- The Beekeepers of Ancient Egypt (Living on Earth, 2015), Helen Palmer interviews Gene Kritsky, Living on Earth, PRI, Living on Earth
- Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (Elizabeth Mary Wright, 1913), Elizabeth Mary Wright, Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), Project Gutenberg, chapters on funerals and on superstitions
- The Ghost World (T. F. Thiselton Dyer, 1893), T. F. Thiselton Dyer, The Ghost World (London: Ward & Downey, 1893), Project Gutenberg, chapter XI, Phantom Butterflies
- Kentucky Superstitions (Daniel Lindsay Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas, 1920), Daniel Lindsay Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas, Kentucky Superstitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1920), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), nos. 1907, 3663–3669
- The symbols of Empire (Fondation Napoléon), Fondation Napoléon, The Bee
- Manchester tattoo parlours buzzing as people commemorate attack with ink (CBC News, 2017), CBC News, May 2017, CBC News
- What does the Manchester bee tattoo mean five years on from the arena attack? (ITV News Granada, 2022), ITV News Granada, 20 May 2022, ITV News
- Beehive (Utah State Library, Utah state symbols), Utah State Library
- Freemasonry & Bees, Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research