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THE BEEByAndrew Gough
 
Part 1: Bedazzled
History is rife with lost knowledge and traditions whose meaning has blurred with the passage of time. I believe the ‘Bee’ is one such tradition, and that its symbolism was important to civilizationsof all ages. Inexplicably, the Bee is dying and nobody is quite sure why. Legend asserts that whenthe Bee dies out, man will shortly follow. We will review the implications of the Bee’s apparentdemise in due course, however in this - our first instalment, we will examine the genesis of theBee’s symbolism in the mist of prehistory.
The Bee in PrehistoryAnatomy of a female Honey Bee
 Thanks to fossilisation, Bees over 100 million years old have been discovered inamber, frozen in time, as if immortalised in their own honey. The Greeks calledamber 
 Electron
, and associated it with the Sun God
 Elector,
who was known as the
awakener 
. Honey, which resembles amber, was also known as an awakener, aregenerative substance that was revered across the ancient world. The resemblance of honey with amber led to the Bees exalted status amongst ancient man and secured itsfavor over other fossilized insects. Marcus Valerius Martialis, the first century Latin poet renowned for his twelve books of 
 Epigrams,
commemorates the symbolism:
"The bee inclos'd, and through the amber shewn,Seems buried in the juice, which was his own.
 
So honour'd was a life in labor spent:Such might he wish to have his monument." 
 A Bee fossilized in amber over 100 hundred million years old - from Southeast Asia Bees accompanied Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and during the mythicalGolden Age, honey dripped from trees like rain water. In Egypt, Bees symbolized astable and obedient society, mantras that would later be adopted by Freemasonry – and the United States of America. The Bee’s ability to pollinate was not lost on prehistoric man and contributed to its reputation as a regenerative, transformative andmystical creature. Indeed, paintings from prehistory confirm that the Bee has beenrevered for tens of thousands of years.In the
Cave of the Spider 
near Valencia Spain, a 15,000 year old painting depicts adetermined looking figure risking his life to extract honey from a precarious cliff-sideBeehive.
 Honey hunting 
represents one of man’s earliest domestic pursuits and hintsat the genesis of the Bee’s adoration in prehistory.
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