Last spring a group in our church read a book by John Philip Newell titled “Sacred Earth Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What our Souls Know and Healing the World.” The book was a follow-up to a series of books that we have read about the care of Creation and the human role in addressing the Climate crisis. Interest in environmental justice has been on the rise in our congregation as we become more aware of the serious threat of human caused climate change and the ways in which we might live more responsibly.

The book sparked an interest in Celtic spirituality for me. I have long been aware of the Christian community at Iona and have close friends who have made pilgrimages to that island to participate in liturgy and song. I have appreciated the depth of Celtic spiritual traditions. After the Roman expansion spread Christianity to parts of northern Europe, including Scotland, the fall of the empire left pockets of Christians who were relatively isolated from the Roman church. Those pockets developed separately from the hierarchy of the formal church and preserved a form of faith that is unique. Modern expressions of Celtic spirituality have much to offer to contemporary Christians including deep respect for the gift of Creation.

My interest in Celtic spirituality led me to some information about Celtic traditions around the death of bee keepers. Funerary traditions for bee keepers were, in some cases, quite elaborate and involved. As a budding amateur beekeeper, my interest was piqued. The tradition was that the bees needed to be informed and involved in the process of mourning the death of a bee keeper. Otherwise the bees might also depart this world, or at least abandon the hives where they were kept. This tradition has even more ancient roots that go back at least as far as ancient Egypt where bees were revered as messengers of the gods and bearers of wisdom from the sprit realm.

The ancients believed that bees needed to be told of births, marriages, arrivals, departures, and deaths in a family. Long before digital record keeping and even before the tradition of writing significant events in family bibles, for those who could afford a bible, perhaps even before handwriting existed, humans have felt the need to record their lives in a form that will survive them. Like the ancients we want to leave our mark on the world. We feel a deep need to somehow be known by those who will come after our time on this earth has ended. We want those who live after us to know that we came and went and somehow left a mark on this world. One of the ancient traditions was to involve domesticated bees in the rituals of death and grief.

Perhaps it is the unique sound of bees flying, the gentle buzz of tiny wings, that inspires us to think of the world of spirits when we see and hear them. Perhaps it is the mesmerizing nature of watching them leave and return to the hive and the highly organized culture of a colony of bees. Perhaps it is the intricate and precise nature of honeycomb with its six-sided chambers making up a perfect storage place for honey. Whatever the reason, bees have been regarded as keepers of story and tradition and messengers between the world of spirits and the life we now live.

In the ancient Celtic tradition, when a beekeeper’s coffin was lifted at their home to be carried to the church for burial, their hives would simultaneously be lifted a few inches from their stands. The church bell would be tolled as the coffin carried the beekeeper on a final journey. The tolling of the bell would stop and silence would descend so that those raising the bee colonies would know the precise moment the beekeeper was being lowered into the grave. At that moment the bee hives would be simultaneously lowered back to their original positions. The journey of the bees was matched to the journey of the beekeeper as their keeper was returned to the earth from which they all came.

It was believed that this action “told the bees” of the event of the keepers death and that the bees would remember and that future generations of bees would know of the significant events in the lives of their keepers. A worker bee lives for perhaps nine weeks, the first three of which are spent entirely in the hive. During that time they somehow gain the information needed to leave the hive, go to flowers that had been previously visited by other bees and return to the hive with nectar and pollen from the plants. During the next few weeks they make repeated trips to and from the hive, discover new sources of nectar, communicate the new locations to other bees, who are raising young bees within the hive that will take their place as workers and carriers of nutrients to the colony. The colony goes through several generations in a single season, constantly producing new bees that somehow carry the knowledge of where to find food and how to sustain the colony. The worker bees that keep the hive alive over the winter are not the bees that placed the life-sustaining honey in storage combs during the summer, but the colony keeps its “knowledge” of how to feed and nurture new bees who will continue the traditions of bringing food into the hive when spring blossoms return.

Those who watch the bees carefully gain a sense that they remember and that they can be trusted to keep memories throughout the generations. If the bees are “told” of the significant events in a human life, surely those events will be remembered by the wider processes of nature forever.

I don’t share all of the beliefs of the ancients when it comes to how to keep bees. It doesn’t appear to me that my bees need to be told anything. I’m not sure that it is accurate to even call me a bee keeper. I am, rather, an observer who occasionally feeds bees in the late winter and early spring, who observes them, and who steals part of their honey, careful to leaf enough for the colony to survive. But I do know that there is something uniquely spiritual about being a steward of bees and I am grateful for the opportunity to observe their colonies. As the seasons of my life pass, I am grateful for the ways that the bees remind me of the spiritual world and how observing them helps me feel connected and rooted in the wideness of all creation.