Bees, Bulls, Moon, and Pleiades
I was in need of sweetness and company.
Bees offered a little story nectar and I bowed at their six feet and four wings.
And this is how I have begun deepening my relationship with the bees.
On Sunday, I visited my father and told him that I have been studying honey bees and natural beekeeping. I also mentioned how tending the bees was something that I wished to do at some point in my life.
“My mother caught a swarm1 once,” he said upon hearing my wish. “And she kept the bees for four years.”
My eyes got out of their sockets and my heart began to race.
My grandmother was a beekeeper.
And surely a natural one back in the 50s in Anatolia. I wondered whether she’d caught the swarm with her bare hands, gently lowering and guiding the bees into a hive.
“Did the bees build their comb as they wished?” I asked, utterly excited. My father shook his head, remembering a distant memory from his childhood. “It was curved,” he replied. Bees build in curves and round shapes, and in natural beekeeping they get to create their combs as curvy as their lovely bee selves wish.
"But unfortunately she couldn’t keep them long. They could not survive beyond those four years.”
He was around six years old when his mother caught the swarm and I know that at around eight, he got separated from her to come to Istanbul to study because he was too bright for his little village with hardly any school. So the bees must have died, or left a year or two after his departure.
I met my paternal grandmother only once, when we visited, when I was about two or three years old. I don’t know much about her. I am trying to get to know her through my father’s eyes, through these stories and repair a harmed relationship as we honour her memory together. I ask my father questions about his childhood, his family, where he lived, how he lived to invite him to tell his stories. I love listening to these2 stories and imagining along with him. I know deep inside me that by getting curious and listening to stories we heal, we mend, we tend to relationships.
There is so much disconnection in the world because we lost the art of oral storytelling. Creating, sharing, listening, participating, imagining, being in the present and in the presence of right stories alter something in the field that no television, no cinema, no book can imitate.
In a similar manner, I think, getting curious and listening to the stories of our planet, our more-than-human family, our universe, our ancient and indigenous ancestors... can be heart changing and mind altering. I love how once upon a time our stories were filled with all kinds of beings. I long for these stories and I find myself mourning that a single human-centric story devours them all. Yet like the honey that does not go bad, the stories never truly die; they hide, they shape shift, and they keep on orbiting with us, dripping from the cavities of our longings.
There was an ancient belief that bees arose out of the dead carcass of a bull. Neolithic times swarm with connections between bees, bulls, the Moon, Sirius, the goddesses, prophecy and the Pleiades.
Around this time of the year, I tend to feel grief for the unlived springtimes of my life, that has been trapped and spent in isolation amongst an estranged concrete city noise and pollution, away from my planet, away from the people who are dear to me. I know this grief is not mine alone, but rather an accumulation of all the griefs that has been stored, storied, and gifted to me through my ancestry, through our collective. This year, I have a book published in France and yet again, I am far, without a visa and under the same circumstances. Moreover I must enter the process of writing again with very little nourishment, and replenishment… Perhaps that was also why, a few weeks ago, I felt like I was sitting by a dead bull. And there the bees offered me some story nectar.
I was imagining and writing a pregnant character in the story3 when the bees started to fly around her and helped me to make a story connection. I knew it then I had to follow the bees. That’s why, I started my current studies and research about honey bees and beekeeping.
The bees came with the balsamic moon in Taurus, the sign of the Cosmic Bull. The balsamic moon or the dark moon is the last phase of the lunar cycle in which the waning crescent disappears to reappear again as a waxing crescent. This phase symbolises death and surrender to the mystery. In a storytelling way, the bees who came to visit my imagination arose from the dead bull, from the death of the Taurus moon.
The Bee Goddess was worshipped in Minoan Crete where the Minotaur, half-man half-bull, dwelt at the centre of the labyrinth, in his own hive-like maze. The queen bee was seen as an epiphany of the goddess and symbolised the regeneration, renewal and fertility alongside with the bull and the Moon. The humming of the bees was perceived as the voice of the goddess, and the sound of creation. The sweet darkness of the hive was imagined as the womb of the mother goddess. The priestesses of the goddess were said to be dressed up as bees and perhaps even performed the waggle dance of the worker/maiden bees in ritual.4
“The busy bee, following the impulsion of its nature to pollinate the flowers and gather their nectar to be transformed into honey, was an example of the continual activity required of human beings to gather the crops and transform them into food. The queen bee, whom all the others serve during their brief lives, was in the Neolithic, an epiphany of the goddess herself. For a watchful eye, the relationship between the queen bee and the goddess must have seemed irresistible, and in Minoan Crete 4,000 years later the goddess and her priestesses, dressed as bees, are shown dancing together on a golden seal found buried with the dead. The hive was her womb-perhaps also an image of the underworld- and later reappears in the beehive tombs of Mycenae.”
The Myth of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
The bull is one of the first creatures we ever drew and one of the most ancient symbols of the goddess and her fertility. Their crescent shaped horns must have felt like the Moon crowned these massive creatures as its beings on Earth. In Astrology, Taurus is ruled by Venus and it is imagined to be the sign that the Moon loves to be in. Both Venus and the Moon are associated with the goddess. And the Moon is exalted in this fixed earth sign that deepens springtime.
Do you see those dots above the bull painting?
This is where the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters5, are located, relative to the bull. The brightest star of the Taurus constellation is Aldebaran. The star’s name comes from Arabic and means the follower. It is said it was due to its approximate location to the Pleiades, following the Seven Sisters. If you find Aldebaran in the night sky, and look around you will see the star cluster Pleiades if the light pollution is low and the sky is clear.
These days, the Sun is with the Pleiades. When you face the Sun, the Pleiades are also around, facing you, hidden under the Sun’s beams. The sunshine and pleiades-shine are entangled with one another. When the flowers eat the Sun, perhaps they also eat a bit of Pleiades and transform them into nectar. Therefore when the bees eat the flowers, they also eat the stars and make Pleiades honey as well as Sun.
Connections are buzzing all around, like the bees, and the muses.
I was visited by the muses disguised as bees.
And as usual, as I follow my story crumbles they tend to connect me to the stories of my ancestors, ancients, and indigenous peoples. When I write; stories never truly die and drip from the cracks and cavities, I also speak from my own lived experience as a storyteller. In this case, I was imagining and writing with the bees, the plants, the pregnancy, the Moon, the deer, Sirius and the Pleiades and yet again, I found them connected to one another in the Neolithic stories. And I get to hear one of my father’s mother stories which I cherish deeply. The bull is yet to appear, I have a suspicion though that they will come out from a certain place and people in my story universe that is a bit associated with Dionysus.
We live on a enchanted storytelling planet. We are swarming with stories. There are stories within stories within stories. The old stories become new, new becomes old, and they deepen with time. After we shared a moment with my father around bees and stories, I wanted to share these enchanting story connections and alchemy with you also because it felt important and magical to do so.
There is so much more I wish to share about the bees and beekeeping and how they relate to stories and story-keeping in my imagination. For that, I must write and send more newsletters though.
Dear busy bees please do busy me with writing stories.
Thank you for reading and listening the buzz in my story hive.
Gizem Gizegen, 2025 Istanbul, ☉ Taurus ☽ Aquarius
P.S.
read this article in the morning and today during her lunch a bee landed between her eyebrows, on her third eye. “He gave me a kiss,” she told me. Who knows perhaps you will be visited by someone also, please whisper, if you do.P.S.S. I am opening this paid Enchanted Zodiac article on the fixed Earth sign, Taurus for a while. If you are curious, feel free to read, explore and share.
Here I must note that, I struggle when he tells stories about the reality we shared. His version can be quite different than the accounts of my mother and myself, which is natural, he tells stories from his point of view, discarding feminine povs like mankind tends to do. This did not fair well in our past, our shared stories collided and our family crumbled. Because families need a shared story that all storytellers can participate. Not a single story, certainly not a single masculine story. Therefore, I tend to stay away from those stories… until they are acknowledged as stories rather than “reality” or “truth” that a masculine mind imposes as the only story into feminine storytelling.
I am working on the second book of the eco-fantasy story.
I can totally picture myself doing it with my sisters.
I know. I count six dots on the cave painting also. But if you spend some time with the Pleiades, you may notice, you cannot always count seven. It’s quite tricky. In fact now we know that there are over thousands of stars in this cluster.
I love how everything is weaved together from bees, to myths, to stars, to oral storytelling. Thank you