Light and dark have different meanings to honeybees.
Light means being outside, means doing work, and means being in danger.
Darkness means home (although not necessarily your home), means a promise of being with your friends and siblings (if it’s your home), means being safe (if you get in).
See, honeybees have this neat behavior where their guard bees will let bees from other hives into their own hive… but only if they bribe the guards with a bit of nectar! (this is the only part of this post that you’ll find in actual books about bees)
As far as I can tell, this is basically evolution sort of independently coming up with the concept of hospitality? Like, if everyone lets random well-behaved bees rest in their hives for a bit, then bees that get lost don’t necessarily have to die. At the same time, requiring tokens like that makes it harder to just be straightforwardly exploited. This all ends up making the species as a whole just that much more robust.
All of which helps to explain where the traditional honeybee beliefs about what night is comes from.
Night is the home of the night-bees, they say, and you have to get home before it enters the land, or they’ll get to you.
There’s even a series of myths about a legendary bee called Third Scout of the Southwestern-Lilacsmell who collects the nectar of a legendary flower that’s hard to describe without the particular technical terms bees use to describe flowers but is said to grant eternal youth, and then gets blown away by a particularly strong gust and doesn’t manage to get back home before dark, but! manages to parlay her way into the hive of the night-bees in exchange for her ambrosia.
The stories then go on to describe her adventures in the hive of the night-bees, as she encounters them and their strange customs and pets and tastes of their strange honey and bread (as is required of bee-hospitality), until she manages to make it back home to finally deliver what she has left of the immortality-nectar to her queen…
Tags:
#bees #story ideas I will never write
Brinens and Things 