Detail of Charles Napier Hemy's painting The Widow (1895)
Telling the bees is a Western European tradition in which bees are told of important events, including deaths, births, marriages and departures and returns in the keeper's household. If the custom was omitted or forgotten and the bees were not "put into mourning" then it was believed a penalty would be paid, such as the bees leaving their hive, stopping the production of honey or dying.[1]
The custom is best known in England but has also been recorded in Ireland, Wales, Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and the United States.[2][3][4][5][6]
^Drake, Samuel Adams (1901). New England Legends and Folk Lore. Boston: Little Brown and Co. pp. 314–315. ISBN 978-1-58218-443-2.
^Cite error: The named reference Roud2006 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Shakespeare's Greenwood. Ardent Media. 1900. p. 159. GGKEY:72QTHK377PC.
^Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Morley, Margaret Warner (1899). The Honey-Makers. A.C. McClurg. pp. 339–343.
^Tammy Horn (21 April 2006). Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. University Press of Kentucky. p. 137. ISBN 978-0-8131-7206-4.
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