Every bee counts in Catholic Culture

The subject of vanishing bees has been a mainstream hot topic for the last several years. Celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson, Henry Fonda, Morgan Freeman and Martha Stewart have gotten involved with helping to reverse this trend and with efforts to increase bee numbers.  Henry Fonda’s son, Peter, played a beekeeper in the 1997 film Ulee’s Gold. The Florida Beekeeper’s Association awarded him the honor of beekeeper of year.  However, the secularly famous are not the only ones involved with bees.  In fact, Bishop William Skylstad, who served as president of the USCCB from 2004-2007, is an avid apiarist.

While beekeeping dates back to about 2400 BC, it was not until the fourth century AD that the Church incorporated candles during her liturgies.  And since that time, bees have made their honeyed presence felt in Catholic history.

During the Middle Ages, convents and monasteries both cultivated bees as the much-needed wax was used not only for candles but writing tablets as well.  The honey the bees provided was often a mealtime item.  The rubrics for today’s altar candles require they contain 51 percent beeswax.

In Celtic lore of the sixth century, people believed that the soul left the body as a bee or butterfly.  Thus the bee was held in high esteem.  If you ever visit Ireland, consider a side trip to Cork with its Honan Hostel and Chapel, which houses a stained glass window of St. Gobnait, patroness of bees and beekeepers.

A humorous bee story involves Pope Urban VIII.  His family name was Tafani, which meant “horsefly.”  At one point the family decided to change its name to Barberini, that is, “bee.” For those of you who have visited St. Peter’s Basilica, I hope you were able to see the beautiful bees on the famous Bernini columns surrounding the papal altar.  And the pope who commissioned these imposing structures—Urban VIII.

Another interesting story relating to bees and Catholic culture, involves Brother Adam, OSB, (Aug. 3, 1898-Sept. 1, 1996) of Buckfast Abbey in England who developed his now famous Buckfast queen bees.  Some of these bees were imported to the United States in 1991.  This influx helped to regenerate American beekeeping.  A number of bee experts consider Brother Adam second only to the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel in the field of genetics. 

Let us return to the Vatican; this time to the papal farm which was begun in the 1930s at the request of Pope Pius XI.  Located in the village of Castel Grandolfo, the 50-acre farm consists of chickens, dairy cows, a garden, olive trees, an orchard and, of course, bees.  The food that is not sent to the papal household is given to the Vatican supermarket.  Vicenzo Scaccioni, director of the agricultural operations, sums up Pope Francis’ ecological vision when he described the farm “precisely as a sign of the pope’s attention to creation, to nature, to the rural world.  As it was in the beginning.”

These are only a few items discovered in researching on bees. Bees not only make living on this planet possible, their industrious lives run like a golden thread through the sacred fabric of our faith.  So the next time you pour a little honey in your coffee or tea, consider saying a prayer for those beekeepers who are helping to save the bees that enrich our faith and nourish life on earth.