Editing Bee (section)

===In mythology and folklore===
{{Main|Bees in mythology}}
[[File:Plaque bee-goddess BM GR1860.4-123.4.jpg|thumb|Gold plaques embossed with winged bee goddesses. [[Kameiros|Camiros]], [[Rhodes]]. 7th century BC.]]

[[Homer]]'s ''[[Homeric Hymns|Hymn to Hermes]]'' describes three bee-maidens with the power of [[divination]] and thus speaking truth, and identifies the food of the gods as honey. Sources associated the bee maidens with [[Apollo]] and, until the 1980s, scholars followed Gottfried Hermann (1806) in incorrectly identifying the bee-maidens with the [[Thriae]].<ref>Susan Scheinberg, "The Bee Maidens of the Homeric ''Hymn to Hermes''", in Albert Heinrichs, ed., ''Harvard Studies in Classical Philology'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11. {{ISBN|0674379306}}; and many others since questioning Gottfried Hermann's 1806 equation of the ''Thriae'' with bee-maidens. Heinrich Gottfried, ''Homeri nomine dignissimum''/Homeric Hymns (Leipzig: 1806), 346 and cxiii. Many took Hermann's unfounded identification at face-value, repeating it ''ad nauseam'', e.g. Hilda M. Ransome, ''The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore'' (NY: Courier, 1937; reprinted as recently as NY: Dover, 2012), 97. {{ISBN|0486122980}}</ref> Honey, according to a Greek myth, was discovered by a nymph called [[Melissa]] ("Bee"); and honey was offered to the Greek gods from [[Helladic period|Mycenean times]]. Bees were also associated with the [[Delphic oracle]] and the prophetess was sometimes called a bee.<ref>{{cite journal | author=Scheinberg, Susan | year=1979 | title=The Bee Maidens of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes | journal=Harvard Studies in Classical Philology | volume=83 | pages=1–28 | doi=10.2307/311093 | jstor=311093}}</ref>

The image of a community of honey bees has been used from ancient to modern times, in [[Aristotle]] and [[Plato]]; in [[Virgil]] and [[Seneca the Younger|Seneca]]; in [[Erasmus]] and [[Shakespeare]]; [[Tolstoy]], and by political and social theorists such as [[Bernard Mandeville]] and [[Karl Marx]] as a model for human [[society]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Bee |year=2004 |title=The Hive: the Story of the Honeybee |location=London |publisher=[[John Murray (publishing house)|John Murray]] |isbn=0-7195-6598-7}}</ref> In English folklore, bees would be told of important events in the household, in a custom known as "[[Telling the bees]]".<ref name="Roud2006">{{cite book |author=Steve Roud |title=The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1Mc4qPiICvcC&pg=PT128 |date=6 April 2006 |publisher=Penguin Books |isbn=978-0-14-194162-2 |page=128 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161128210444/https://books.google.com/books?id=1Mc4qPiICvcC&pg=PT128 |archive-date=28 November 2016}}</ref> 
Honey bees, signifying immortality and resurrection, were royal [[Bee (heraldry)|heraldic emblems]] of the [[Merovingians]], revived by [[Napoleon I of France|Napoleon]].<ref>[http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/symbols/index.asp Eagle and the bee on the Napoleonic coat of arms]</ref>