Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018
The Great Mother: Queen of May by Suzanne Ress
Beltane
WHEN I OPEN MY front door early in the morning at the start of May, I hear the music of many dozens of birds, singing while they busily work to collect food for their newly hatched young. I see the bright green grass in the pastures, soft and sweet, it seems to grow from one hour of the day to the next. And I smell the honey-scented perfume of the black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia) blossoming throughout the surrounding woods. This lovely springtime fragrance lures millions of honeybees to gather the copious nectar of the trees’ racemes of white flowers. Already at sunup I hear the bees happily buzzing in the trees.
The word Beltane comes from old Gaelic and means “blazing fire,” for May Eve (April 30) and May Day (May 1) was a major festival time for our ancient Celtic predecessors, and it was a fire festival. Great bonfires were lit on the evening of April 30th and fed to burn through the night and into the next day. Sometimes animals were lead between two fires, for it was believed that the heat and smoke would purify them and increase their fertility, as it did the land. A few brave humans jumped over or ran between the fires for the same reasons.
Beltane was second in importance only to Samhain in most of the Celtic world. In parts of Wales, May 1st (Calan Mai) was even more important than Samhain. The Welsh believed that on that day a doorway opened into fairyland. The Welsh were the probable originators of the May pole dance tradition, while the rest of the Iron Age Celtic tribes were still dancing deasil around the bonfire.
Beltane was, and still is, a solar festival celebrating birth, fertility, and the blossoming forth of all life, represented symbolically by the union of the great Mother with the sun god at this beautiful time of year.
The ancient Greeks worshipped the goddess of the hunt, wild animals, virginity, and childbirth in the name and form of Artemis. Many of the ornaments, statuettes, and carvings that archaeologists have found that were connected to the Artemis cult took the form of a bee, or a female head on a bee’s body. The Greeks believed that honey came down from heaven onto flowers and trees to be collected by bees, the messengers of souls.
The Beltane Buzz
On the island of Crete, in ancient times, the father of the nymphs who raised Zeus was called Melisseus which means “the bee man”. Melissa (literally, “bee”) was one of the nymphs who raised Zeus, feeding him on milk and honey. It was believed that the muses and the bees brought the gifts of song and poetry to humankind, while honey mead brought song and prophecy. Nectar and ambrosia, the food and drink of the gods, were names for mead and honey.
One day, in late April or early May, while the black locust bloomed everywhere, I lay down on an outdoor garden bench to rest for a few minutes after lunch. Predictably, I fell into a deep sleep. The air temperature was so pleasant, and the birdsong so soothing.
I was soon and suddenly awakened by a loud buzzing noise, something like dozens of flying drones hovering over my head. I sat bolt upright, realizing immediately what it was, and ran to my bee yard. In a wide, cloud-like formation above the hives, what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of buzzing bees glittered in the sunshine. A swarm! I stood and watched, willing them to land on a very low branch of a small cherry tree.
But my will was not strong enough, for they chose to alight on a thick branch of an old cherry tree about eighteen feet off the ground. I watched for about twenty minutes, until most of them had settled into the form of a long thick brown beard hanging from the branch.
It is believed that the wood on which a swarm has landed becomes imbued with magic power, and is then an excellent choice for making wands and other tools. Certainly it is true that a swarm leaves something on its branch, for once one swarm has chosen that spot, others that issue afterward will often chose the same one.
I left them alone and tended to other business: I prepared a lightweight Styrofoam swarm box with four wax frames and tossed in a cotton pad scented with lemon grass essential oil, and then I set it under the cherry tree in the sun to warm. I gathered wild Silene vulgaris and dandelion greens from the edges of the pasture to cook for dinner, and I picked a tender head of lettuce and a hand full of fresh chives from our garden for a salad, then I went to the chicken coop to gather the eggs our hens had laid that day.
Finally, I pulled a big heavy ladder out of storage and dragged it into the pasture where I set it up to lean next to the swarm on the high tree branch.
Then I put my protective bee suit on over my clothes, and, carrying the swarm box under one arm, I slowly climbed the ladder. In my pocket were two long coiled utility straps.
With quite a bit of difficulty, swearing, and trying not to lose my balance while looking up with my hooded mask on, I finally managed to hang the swarm box from the branch, using the utility straps, so that the bottom tip of the swarm beard was inside the box.
Just as I finished, I saw my husband walking up from the large vegetable garden he had been planting at the bottom of the hill.
“Need any help?” he called to me.
“I think it’s okay,” I said from up on the ladder.
“Maybe in a little while, if they all go in, you can help me get it down.”
He passed on by, and I climbed down the ladder. Seeing all of our horses lined up on the other side of the fence watching me, and lustily eyeing the spring grass, I decided to let them into the pasture for an hour to graze. But before I went to them I took off my bright yellow bee suit and flung it on the grass at the foot of the ladder for when I’d need it later.
Just before opening the gate for the horses, I saw my husband pass by again. He noticed the yellow suit sprawled out on the ground at the base of the ladder, and, mistaking it for me, ran toward it at full speed!
The horses and I, watching this drama from the other side of the fence, had a good laugh when he got to the suit and realized it was empty.
A colony of bees will swarm around Beltane, either because it has outgrown its hive or because its old queen is faltering in her egg laying. In both cases a new, virgin queen is deliberately created by the colony, by nourishing an ordinary female egg/nymph on royal jelly. The swarming bees follow either the old queen or the virgin queen out of the hive, to form a new colony. From one colony come two: this is the honeybees’ way to populate. A swarm is a joyous celebration, on their part, of fertility, a new virgin queen, and the blossoming of nature.
An old folk rhyme, which has a variation in just about every European language, is:
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay,
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon,
A swarm in July
Is not worth a fly.
Just before swarming, all of the bees that intend to leave the original colony load their stomachs with honey. They produce a wonderful pheromonal odor similar to lemon grass essential oil, and they all rush out of the hive together, usually between 2 and 4 p.m. on a sunny day. Because their stomachs are so full and their minds are on swarming, they don’t go far, and they rarely, if ever, sting.
Once a swarm has been captured and hived into a swarm box, if their queen is a virgin, the bees must wait a few days while she makes her mating flights and returns to start laying eggs. After 21 days, the first eggs will have become bees, but it will take several more weeks before the hive has enough mature forager bees to produce honey. A July swarm doesn’t have enough time to produce any honey before summer’s blooms come to an end, so it is considered worthless to a beekeeper.
Cave art discovered in Spain, near Valencia, has shown us that humans were already collecting honey from wild beehives in late Paleolithic times, more than 12,000 years ago. Early humans had realized that not only was honey delicious to eat, but it could be used for healing and curing various ailments, and as a preservative for food and other things. And when honey became fermented into mead, drinking it could make one feel like a god.
Mead was the first fermented drink, before both beer and wine. Most certainly the first mead was produced by accident when a too-runny, unripe honey was left and forgotten in a warm place. Whoever unsuspectingly slurped up some of that first fermented honey and became inebriated must have been truly amazed at honey’s power.
The ancient Egyptians were amongst the first beekeepers. To them, the honeybee was a symbol for the human soul and rebirth. They believed that bees were made when the sun god, Ra, wept upon the Earth. His tears turned into bees that worked the flowers and trees to make honey and wax. Wax was used in sorcery to form candle likenesses of animals and humans for spell casting, and it was used to mummify the dead.
India’s oldest sacred book, the Rig-Veda (1500—1200 BCE), written in Sanskrit, is full of allusions to honey and bees. The gods Vishnu, Krishna, and Indra were known as “Madhava”—the nectar-
born ones. Their symbol is a bee.
From the Rig-Veda, Agni, the messenger between gods and humans, addresses both when he says:
I have partaken wisely of the sweet food
That stirs good thoughts, best banisher of troubles,
The food round which all gods and mortals,
Calling it honey, come together.
Around 900 BCE when the Biblical Proverbs were written, number 24:13—14, compares honey and honey comb to the knowledge of wisdom:
My son, eat thou honey, because it is good, and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a sweet reward, and thy expectation shall not be disappointed.
In present day Italy where I live, the month of May is known as “Mary’s month,” or the month of the Madonna. This is a remnant from the long ago Roman times of Diana (Artemis) worship, when Beltane and the month of May were times to celebrate both the virginity of the new queen and the fertility of nature. And it is certainly not by chance that international Mother’s Day is celebrated everywhere on the first Sunday in May.
As a beekeeper, it is impossible for me to experience Beltane without being aware of bees, blossoms, and honey. It is this awareness that brings me closer to the old Celtic ways and the Beltane festival celebrating the great Mother, rebirth, and the blossoming of new life in all of its forms.