“AND HE DOES NOT GET STUNG”:
Telling the Bees (Emily Polk, April 3, 2025, Emergence)
I drove out to Hudson, a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, to meet leaders of the New Hampshire Beekeepers Association. I arrived just in time to watch a couple of senior bearded men in flannel shirts and Carhartt pants transport crates of bees into new hives. I was completely entranced by their delicacy and elegance. They seemed to be dancing. I wrote of one of the beekeepers, “He moves in a graceful rhythm … shaking the three-pound crate of bees into the hive, careful not to crush the queen, careful to make sure she has enough bees to tend to her, careful not to disturb or alarm them as he tenderly puts the frames back into the hive. And he does not get stung.” I was not expecting to find old men dancing with the grace of ballerinas under pine trees with a tenderness for the bees I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not witnessed it myself. This moment marked the beginning of my interest in what bees could teach us.
HUMANS AND BEES have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.
While bees have long been understood to be conduits between the living and the dead, bearing witness to tears from God and the grief of common villagers, less is known about the grief of bees themselves. Can bees feel sad? Do they feel angst? Among the many roles honeybees play in the hive—housekeeper, queen bee attendant, forager—the one that catches my attention is the undertaker bee, whose primary job is to locate their dead brethren and remove them from the hive. (Depending on the health of the hive and its approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, this is no small job.) My beekeeper friend Amy, who, like me, has loved bees since she was a little girl, tells me over lunch that one of the craziest things about this is that there’s only one bee doing it at a time. “Just one bee will lift the body out of the hive and then fly away with it as far as possible,” she says. “Can you imagine lifting one whole dead human by yourself and carrying it as far as you can?” We marvel over this feat of spectacular strength. “It’s always the females doing it,” she adds, which makes me smile, because all worker bees are female. The male drone bees only number in the hundreds and their only purpose is to mate with the queen bee, after which they die.
But I want to know if the undertaker bees feel anything while they are removing dead bees. Do bees have emotions?
A few years ago the first study to show what scientists colloquially refer to as “bee screams” was published. Scientists found that when giant hornets drew near Asian honeybees, the honeybees put their abdomens into the air and ran while vibrating their wings, making a noise like “a human scream.” The sound has also been described as “shrieking” and “crying.” According to scientists, honeybees’ “antipredator pipes” share acoustic traits with alarm shrieks and panic calls that mirror more socially complex vertebrates.
I am not surprised at all that a tiny insect also screams in a way that has been compared to a human scream. I don’t think it has anything to do with social complexity or being a large vertebrate, but rather something much more primal and universal to the experience of being alive. Every day for months after my baby daughter’s death I also felt compelled to scream. I wanted to scream at the dogwood blossoms outside my home in Massachusetts; I wanted to scream at the grocery cashier cracking jokes. I never associated the urge with being human. I felt it was what an animal did who was no longer safe in the world. When I read the study, the sharp edges of my own grief felt soothed by the underlying revelation—there are profound connections shared between living creatures, no matter the size of our brains, no matter how loud the sound of our screams.
I wanted to know more.