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Lore 314: Hive Mind

September 7, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the summer of 2022, the British royal beekeeper stepped out on a cool September day, approached the hives in the palace grounds, and told roughly one million bees about the death of their queen. That is the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a quiet, deliberate act, performed in a tradition known as "telling the bees"—a custom that stretches back centuries and demands that kept bees be verbally informed of all major family news, especially deaths. Fail to tell them, the old belief warns, and the bees might stop producing honey, fly away, or die.

This episode of Lore traces the deep and strange folklore that has surrounded bees across cultures and millennia, from creation myths to witch trials to the quiet rituals of rural beekeepers. The thread that runs through it all is a human need to make sense of a creature that is both essential and mysterious.

The Bee in Myth and Religion

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What you'll learn

  • 1 Main Outline
  • 2 (00:00) **Opening: The San Creation Myth and the Bee** - Aaron introduces the San people's creation myth, where a bee carries the god Mantis across the primordial waters and dies, leaving behind the seed that grows into the first human
  • 3 (04:39) **Global Bee Lore: Ancient Egypt to Christianity** - Aaron surveys the vast range of bee folklore across cultures, beginning with the Egyptian belief that Ra's tears became the first bees
  • 4 (06:28) **The Virgin Bee: Christian Symbolism and Strange Reproduction Theories** - Christians associated bees with the Virgin Mary because they believed bees reproduced without sex, making them a theological metaphor for the Immaculate Conception
  • 5 (07:43) **Bees in Romance, Marriage, and Witchcraft** - Hindu mythology features the love god Kamadeva carrying a bow strung with bees; Central European tradition held that bees would sting an unfaithful partner if they walked past a hive
  • 6 (09:16) **The Wax Crocodile and Witchcraft Connections** - A 4,000-year-old Egyptian text tells of a priest who sculpted a wax crocodile that came to life and seized his wife's lover
  • 7 (11:20) **John Stewart and His Blood-Fed Bee Demons** - In 1510 England, former schoolteacher John Stewart was tried for sorcery after witnesses claimed he kept three "humble bees" (demons) under a stone and fed them drops of his blood

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Not all big stories are about equally large characters. In the world of folklore, sometimes even the littlest players have a massive stage to perform upon.

Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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