Telling the Bees: What’s the Buzz?

The other day, Diana Gabaldon announced (FINALLY!) the release date for the next book in her Outlander series, entitled Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. For those of you familiar with the series, she’s a fan of long and unwieldy titles, so this was no exception, but I was surprised at how many people in Social Media Land found GTTBTIAG a puzzling series of words… because telling the bees is a really cool bit of folklore. Of course, this doesn’t bode well for Jamie and Claire Fraser, as one typically tells the bees about death… but that’s Diana Gabaldon’s story to tell, not mine.

In general, this practice is a nineteenth century custom, but its origins may be quite a bit older. In 1858, a Quaker author named John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem entitled – you guessed it – Telling the Bees. He mentions the chore-girl, who is “draping each hive with a shred of black” as she “[tells] the bees of one gone on the journey we all must go.” The poem concludes with:

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still

   Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since

   In my ear sounds on:—

“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!

   Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

Now, Whittier was a Quaker from New England, but this custom of whispering news of the dead to the hive is found in a number of different places. In parts of Appalachia, you had to let the bees know when someone in the family died because if you didn’t, your bees would leave and fly somewhere else to make their honey – and obviously, in a rural community, beekeeping was pretty important. In the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, there are many mountain traditions involving the bees and beekeeping – including that failure to move your bees when a family member dies means all your bees will die too.

Both New Englanders and Appalachian settlers would have brought their beliefs to America from England and western Europe.

In Hilda Ransome’s The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore, the author explores some of the regional customs of telling the bees throughout Britain:

• In Buckinghamshire, you would tap the hives three times and say “Little brownies, your master is dead.” If the bees started buzzing and humming in response, it meant that they would stay even though their master had died.
• In Oxfordshire, if the bees are not told of a family member’s death, the entire swarm would die.
• Northumberland legend holds that when you give bees news, you must do so politely, in a whisper; “if harshly spoken, they will desert.” Also, bees don’t like bad language, so no swearing in front of your hive.

There are a number of articles that claim this tradition is based on an early Celtic practice, but I’m still trying to find documentation of that – if anyone knows of any sources, please point me in that direction. That said, there was a Celtic belief that bees served as messengers between our world and the realm of the spirits – so it would certainly make sense to let your hive know if someone new was going to be joining the world of the spirits; they could pass that message along to pave the way for the newly departed.

Regardless of the origins of the practice, it’s most likely something that Claire – and possibly Jamie – would have known about in post-Colonial America… which means a part of me is dreading the November release of Book 9 in Diana Gabaldon’s series. After two decades of reading these books, I am still not prepared to say goodbye to either of these characters, and I don’t want anyone to have to tell the bees that they have gone.

For more bee folklore, be sure to check out this article: Legends and Lore of Bees