For most of human history, the family beehive was not treated like livestock. It was treated like a member of the household, one that had to be kept in the loop. When a baby was born, someone walked out to the hive and said so. When the household moved, the bees were told before the wagons were loaded. And at the two moments that shaped a family more than any other, a wedding and a funeral, the bees were not just informed. They were invited in, dressed for the occasion, and given a share of the cake.
This custom sits inside the broader European folk practice of telling the bees, but the wedding and funeral rites are where the tradition becomes something more than an announcement. They are where a colony of insects was folded, quite literally, into a family’s most important ceremonies. Here is how that worked, where it came from, and why a few beekeepers still do a version of it today.
The Bees as Family Members
The idea underneath all of this is simple and a little startling: in much of rural Europe and, later, parts of colonial America, the hive was understood as part of the household’s inner circle. Bees provided honey and wax, they pollinated the orchard and the kitchen garden, and their well-being was read as tied to the fortunes of the family that kept them. A neglected or uninformed hive might sicken, stop producing, or abscond entirely, and folklore turned that practical anxiety into ritual.
Because the bees were kin, they were owed the same courtesy any close relative would expect: to hear the big news firsthand, and to be included when the family gathered to grieve or to celebrate. Leave them out, the belief went, and they would take offense. A Lincolnshire account from the nineteenth century put the stakes plainly, noting that if the bees were not told of a wedding they would grow irate, and if they were not told of a death they would sicken and many of them would die. The custom was recorded across England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Bohemia, and it traveled with immigrants to New England and Appalachia.
Weddings: Inviting the Hive to Rejoice
Weddings were the happy end of the tradition, and the rituals around them were correspondingly warm. The most consistent thread across regions was the wedding cake. At weddings in parts of England, a piece of the cake was carried out and left beside the hive, and the bees were told the name of the newly married couple. A slice of cake for the bees was their portion of the feast, the same gesture you might make toward any relative who could not sit at the table.
Decorating the hive was the other common flourish. In Brittany, custom held that unless the hives were dressed with scarlet cloth at a wedding and the bees allowed to take part in the rejoicing, the colony would leave. A Scottish newspaper, the Dundee Courier, described the practice as late as the 1950s: when a wedding took place in the household, the hive would be decorated and a slice of wedding cake set beside it.
Some traditions asked the couple themselves to do the introducing. In Westphalia, in Germany, newlyweds moving into their new home were expected to present themselves to the bees first, or their married life would be unfortunate. The gesture reads almost like a receiving line in reverse: before the couple could settle into their household, they had to greet its oldest and busiest residents. In parts of New England, families even sang the news, with rhyming couplets addressed directly to the hive announcing that a marriage had taken place.
There is a lovely logic to inviting bees to a wedding specifically. Honey has been a symbol of sweetness and union across cultures for thousands of years, from the Persian honey exchange between bride and groom to the medieval mead tradition that gave us the word honeymoon. If you want the full sweep of that story, we trace it in our piece on honey’s long history as a symbol of romance. Bringing the bees into the wedding closed a circle: the creatures that made the sweetness were welcomed to the celebration of it.
Funerals: Putting the Bees Into Mourning
The funeral rites were older, more detailed, and far more solemn. When a death occurred in a beekeeping family, the bees had to be told, and told properly, or a second calamity was thought to follow. The phrase folklorists use is that the bees were "put into mourning."
The announcement itself followed a near-ritual form. In many English accounts, the goodwife or a close relative would approach the hives, sometimes tapping on them with the house key to get the bees’ attention, and quietly speak the name of the person who had died. A description from the Carolina mountains records it with stark simplicity: you knock on each hive and say, "Lucy is dead." The tone mattered. Bees were to be addressed gently and never in anger, and a household that quarreled near the hives risked driving the colony away.
Then came the mourning cloth. From England to Germany, hives were draped in black crepe, the same fabric that signaled mourning on a door or a hat, and the black drape doubled as a signal to passersby that the family had suffered a loss. In parts of Wales, families tied black ribbons around the hives and sang hymns so the bees would not depart. The mourning cloth often stayed on the hive for weeks.
When it was the beekeeper who had died, the rites deepened further, and the bees were treated as mourners in their own right. Food and drink from the funeral, the funeral biscuits and wine, were carried out and left beside the hive so the bees could share in the meal. In some places the hive was lifted a few inches off its stand and set down again at the very moment the coffin was raised, so that the bees rose and settled with their keeper one last time. In others, the hive was turned to face the funeral procession as it passed. In parts of the Pyrenees, a garment belonging to the person who had died was buried under the bench where the hives stood, and the bees of the dead were never afterward sold, given away, or exchanged.
Each of these gestures says the same thing in a different key. The bees were not spectators to the family’s grief. They were part of the household that grieved, and the ritual gave them a role, a portion, and a place in the procession.
The Poets Who Kept the Custom Alive
Much of what we know about these rites survives because writers found them haunting. The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier published his ballad "Telling the Bees" in 1858, describing a chore-girl draping each hive with a shred of black as she sang the news of a death through a summer garden. The poem fixed the funeral version of the custom in the popular imagination and is still the reason many people have heard of it at all. Emily Dickinson, another great poet of New England, returned to bees again and again in her work, and the era’s fascination with the little mourners runs through nineteenth-century verse.
By the time these poems were written, the custom was already fading. One folklorist noted that by the 1840s only a handful of people in her corner of New England had actually witnessed the rite. The poets were preserving something they could feel slipping away, which is often exactly when a tradition gets written down.
Why the Tradition Faded, and Where It Lingers
The decline tracks with the industrialization of both farming and beekeeping. As backyard hives gave way to commercial operations and families moved off the land, the intimate, one-household-one-hive relationship that made the custom meaningful simply became less common. You do not drape black crepe over a hundred rented pollination hives on a flatbed truck.
And yet the custom has never entirely disappeared. In 2018, French beekeepers held a symbolic funeral in central Paris, complete with coffin-like bee boxes, to protest pesticide losses, a modern echo of the old mourning rite turned toward the survival of the bees themselves. And when Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, the Royal Beekeeper carried out the old tradition and formally told the hives at the royal residences that their mistress had died and a new master would care for them. The story traveled around the world, and a great many people who had never heard of telling the bees suddenly wanted to know more.
That instinct, to include the bees in the moments that matter, is the same one that runs through so much of humanity’s long relationship with the hive. Bees have been woven into weddings, funerals, and sacred rites across an astonishing range of cultures, a story we explore in our piece on honey in religions around the world. For the broader arc of how people have valued the hive across the centuries, our overview of honey’s rich heritage through history picks up the thread.
Keeping a Gentle Version of the Custom
You do not need a hive of your own to appreciate what this tradition was reaching for. At its heart, telling the bees at a wedding or a funeral was a way of acknowledging that a family’s fortunes are bound up with the natural world that sustains it, and that the creatures we depend on deserve to be treated with courtesy and even affection. On our own Chesterhaven Beach Farm, spending time with the hives has a way of making that connection feel less like folklore and more like common sense.
If you want to carry a little of that spirit into a celebration of your own, honey is the natural way to do it. A jar of single-varietal honey has been a fitting gift for weddings and milestones for as long as people have kept bees, and our Eastern Shore honey collection and curated honey gift sets are a good place to start. There is something quietly meaningful about giving a food that took an entire season, and thousands of bees, to make.
FAQs About Bees at Weddings and Funerals
Why were bees invited to weddings and funerals?
In much of rural Europe and colonial America, the family hive was regarded as part of the household rather than as ordinary livestock. Because the bees were treated as kin, folk custom held that they should share in the family’s most important moments. At weddings the bees were given a slice of cake and their hives were sometimes decorated; at funerals the hives were draped in mourning cloth and the bees were given a share of the funeral food. Leaving them out was thought to offend the colony and bring misfortune.
What did people do with the hive at a wedding?
Wedding customs varied by region but shared a few common threads. A slice of wedding cake was often left beside the hive, and the bees were told the name of the married couple. In Brittany the hives were dressed with scarlet cloth so the bees could take part in the rejoicing, and in Westphalia, Germany, newlyweds were expected to introduce themselves to the bees before settling into their new home. Some New England families even sang the news to the hive in rhyming couplets.
How were bees "put into mourning" at a funeral?
When a death occurred, a family member would approach the hives, sometimes tapping with the house key, and gently announce who had died. The hives were then draped in black crepe or tied with black ribbon, which also signaled the family’s loss to passersby. If the beekeeper themselves had died, food and drink from the funeral were left by the hive, and in some places the hive was lifted or turned to face the procession at the moment the coffin was moved.
Is the tradition of telling the bees still practiced today?
Yes, though it is now more a gesture of respect than a survival ritual. A number of hobby beekeepers still tell their bees about major life events as a way of honoring the old custom. The practice drew global attention in 2022 when the Royal Beekeeper formally informed the hives at the royal residences of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2018 French beekeepers staged a symbolic funeral in Paris to protest bee losses.
Where did the custom of telling the bees come from?
The custom is best documented across Western Europe, including England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Bohemia, and it was carried to New England and Appalachia by immigrants. Its deeper origins are uncertain, though many accounts connect it to older Celtic ideas of bees as messengers between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It was most widely practiced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
What is the poem "Telling the Bees" about?
"Telling the Bees" is an 1858 ballad by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier. It describes a servant draping the household hives in black and singing the news of a death through a summer garden, capturing the funeral version of the custom. The poem is a large part of the reason the tradition is still remembered today, and it helped fix the image of bees as mourners in the popular imagination.
