Apisaints

Tammy Horn, author of Bees in America, has kindly sent me some additional information about St Gobnat , also spelt St Gobnait, (mentioned in earlier post).

Apparently she was Irish, 6th century, and a genuine beekeeper. Her convent was in County Cork, and true to most legends, seemed to have used beehives to prevent thieves from breaking into the convent.

In Matrifocus, Cross Quarterly for the Godess Woman (I'm not making this up!), there's an interesting article about her with a picture of her standing on a skep. Her special day is 11 February and she is buried at Ballyvourney in Co Cork, Ireland.

Saints in the silly season

It's August — commonly called the “silly season” for news in the UK media. And I can see why. There's hardly anything being reported in the bee world at the moment. So I thought I'd ferret around amongst the patron saints of bees and beekeeping and found three more:

Bernard of Clairvaux has his holy day coming up soon — 20 August. Like Ambrose, he also seems to have been a honey-tongued merchant with little real connection to bees.

St Valentine of Rome is another patron saint of bees and beekeeping. Apart from being the patron saint of greetings card manufacturers, he is also the patron saint of fainting — I suppose it's all that swooning on St Valentine's day. Again, I can't find much of a beekeeping connection. Well, except perhaps for the birds and the bees ...

But wait, here's another genuine one — Irish again — St Modomnoc:

... an Irish monk who studied with St David at his monastery in Pembrokeshire. When he was due to return to Ireland, some of the bees he had been keeping swarmed on the mast of his ship and, bringing them back with him, he thereby introduced the art of apiculture to his native land.

You can celebrate his feast day of this patron saint of bees (not beekeeping) on 13 February.

UPDATE 10 Feb 2005: here's another one: St Haralampi. He's the Orthodox patron saint of bee-keepers, and is believed to be the first to have discovered the healing powers of honey and bee products. His day is 10 February.

Patron saint of bees exposed as spin doctor!

I've been most disconcerted to find that St Ambrose, the patron saint of beekeeping, was nothing more than a “Honey Tongued Doctor” famed for his speaking and preaching ability. This led to the use of a beehive and bees in his iconography and his association with bees. It seems he had no direct involvment in bees.

To add insult to injury, one of his famous sayings was “No one heals himself by wounding another”. He obviously knew nothing of bees.

I think he was lacking in other departments, too. According to the Doctors of the Catholic Church, he “firmly maintained that population increases in direct proportion to the esteem virginity is held”.

Can we have a new patron saint, please? Any offers?

Here's my offering: St Gobnat (great name that would surely have the approval of Father Jack of Craggy Island) of Ireland. At the moment she seems to be a mere “Patroness of Bees”, but I think she deserves better:

... an incident in the life of the sixth century Saint Gobnat of Ireland has her shaking the bees out of one of her hives to ward off a gang of cattle rustlers. In more colorful accounts the bees are miraculously changed into soldiers and the hive from which these myrmidons issued is transformed into a brass helmet.