honey bee note #1
Johnson, B.R. ; Honey Bee Biology, Foreward
Honey Bees / Anthropology (?)
Says that entomologist William Morton Wheeler observed in 1923 that cultures in antiquity viewed honeybees as divine beings.
"In antiquity this bee's intimacy with flowers, its avoidance of all things unwholesome, its astonishing industry in storing honey, and its skill in making wax made the honey bee, 'A divine being, a prime favourite of the gods, that had somehow survived the golden age or had voluntarily escaped from the garden of eden with poor fallen man for the purpose of sweetening his bitter lot'"
[Ways that bees were viewed in the past, how long have humans and bees coexisted]