Precisely the same belief holds in North Germany, where they also maintain that when the master of the house dies some one must go into the garden and shake the trees, saying, “The master is dead,—the master is dead,” else they will all decay.
From the same Yorkshire friend I learn that bees further require a taste of every thing served at the funeral feast, and that an instance has lately come before her in which this had been done, and a small portion of each dish laid before the hives. In Lancashire the bees demand an announcement of marriage also, on pain of misfortune to the bridal pair. The same thing is done in Brittany, where a piece of red cloth is tied to the hives while imparting the information.
Bees have in many parts of France been regarded with religious reverence as the instruments for fabricating wax for the altar-lights, and it was considered a sacrilegious act to kill them. The same feeling existed in Wales. Thus the Gevantian code says: “The origin of bees is from Paradise; God conferred this blessing upon them, therefore mass cannot be said without the wax;” and it was once held in that country that bees were created white, but turned brown at the Fall. That strange writer, Charles Butler, in his Feminine Monarchie, A.D. 1634, tells how “A certain woman, having some stalls of bees which yielded not unto her her desired profit, but did consume and die of the murrain, made her moan to another woman, more simple than herself, who gave her counsel to get a consecrated host and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the priest to receive the host, which, when she had done, she kept it in her mouth, and, being come home again, she took it out and put it into one of her hives, whereupon the murrain ceased and the honey abounded. The woman, therefore, lifting up the hive at the due time to take out the honey, saw therein (most strange to be seen) a chapel built by the bees, with an altar in it, the walls adorned by marvellous skill of architecture, with windows conveniently set in their places, also a door, and a steeple with bells. And, the host being set on the altar, the bees, making a sweet noise, flew round about it.” And, further, he relates that some thieves having stolen a pyx and cast the wafer under a hive
