To The Bee Goddess Revisited!

This is a Cretan Bee Pendant, image of the "Double Goddess" (Demeter & Persephone), from Chryssolakkos, the Necropolis at Malia c. 1700 B.C. (Museum of Herakleion, Crete), Here you see Demeter & Persephone are bothe equated with the Bee.

Bees seem to come up in pagan legends often. It may be something to do with them beeing ruled by a queen, which sort of ties in with legends of The White Goddess Images of a goddess portrayed as a queen bee are found in Minoan and other early European art. The picture above is from a Neolithic cave painting from Southern Spain. It seems to show a goddess with the head of a bee and birds feet. Many people find the image slightly disturbing, along with the below
writing by Virgil. Please read with an open mind and caution if you are Xian,you will not see the beauty in his words.

"Apis" meant "bull" to the Egyptians, and also "bee" in Latin. The art of the Minoan civilization of Crete often features bulls horns with bees (or sometimes butterflies or double axes)above them. Bees and butterflies are both symbols of the soul, and these pictures may represent the departing soul of a sacred bull, sacrificed with a double headed axe or labrys (the word "labyrinth" means "house of the double headed axe"). It is not known if the Minoans kept bees, but it is known that they drank mead. It used to be believed that bees could be spontaneously generated from the carcasses of bulls, especially if they were buried up to the horns in the ground. This process was known as bougonia Virgil describes the practice in his Georgics book IV, attributing it to the Egyptians:

"First in a place by nature close, they build
A narrow flooring, guttered walled, and tiled.
In this, four windows are contrived , that strike,
To the four winds opposed, their beams oblique.
A steer of two years old they take, whose head
Now first with burnished horns begins to spread:
They stop his nostrils, while he strives in vain
To breathe free air, and struggles with his pain.
Knocked down he dies: his bowels, bruised within,
Betray no wound on his unbroken skin.
Extended thus, in this obscene abode
They leave the beast; but first sweet flowers are strewed
Beneath his body, broken boughs and thyme,
And pleasing cassia, just renewed in prime.
This must be done ere spring makes equal day,
When western winds on curling waters play;
Ere painted meads produce their flowery crops,
Or swallows twitter on the chimney tops.
The tainted blood, in this close prison pent,
Begins to boil, and through the bones ferment.
Then (wondrous to behold) new creatures rise,
A moving mass at first, and short of thighs;
Till, shooting out with legs, and imped with wings,
The grubs proceed to bees with pointed stings,
And more and more affecting air they try
Their tender pinions, and begin to fly:
At length like summer storms from spreading clouds,
That burst at once, and pour impetuous floods-
Or flights of arrows from the Parthian bows,
When from afar they gall embattled foes-
With such a tempest through the skies they steer;
And such a form the winged squadrons bear.
What god, O muse! this useful science taught?
Or by what man's experience was it brought?"
~Virgil~

Bee Goddess In Lithuania

The Bee Goddess was known as

Austeja, (ow-STAY-jah)

Bee Goddess In The Bible

Deborah
"Queen Bee," a ruler of Israel in the matriarchal period, bearing the same name as the Goddess incarnate in early Mycenaean and Anatolian rulers as "the Pure Mother Bee." Deborah lived under a sacred palm tree that also bore her name, and wias identified with the maternal "prophetess" or "judge"to disguise the fact that she was one of the governing matriarchs of a former age(Judges 4:4).