Click here to listen to Reciprocity and Right Relationship: Reflections on “The Queen Bee” in the season 1 archives on buzzsprout
Fairy tales are inherently subversive. If you sit with one, if you think about what puzzles, delights, or infuriates you, you will be changed. And there are thousands of fairy tales and stories in cultures around the world, that have this power.
“The Queen Bee,” a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, was new to me when I set out to record this podcast. It’s pretty short and I didn’t expect much.
I didn’t love the story or think that it would find its way into a podcast, but the tale kept revealing new depths and I was compelled to follow the trail.
This fairy tale got me thinking about what kind of person I am and who I want to be, about hopelessness and surrender, belonging and miracles.
I hope you find inspiration and food for thought here too.
Transcript of Reciprocity and Right Relationship: Reflections on “The Queen Bee”
Hello everyone, and welcome to Myth Matters, a bi-weekly podcast of storytelling and conversation about mythology, and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist, Catherine Svehla. Thank you for joining me. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours you are part of this story circle…
I ended last podcast conference of the birds with a question about how to have a living practice, how to move the “spiritual” out of that compartment or ghetto that we sometimes put it into and into daily life. How to make it an ongoing search for expression and gesture that’s needed, available, and satisfying. This is a real, ongoing question and project for me, and of course the comes with the question of how mythology, and our “identified” myths, that is the old stories that I share on this program, the classics and the religions and the fairy tales, can help us do this.
I’ve got a particularly rich story to share with you today, one in which I’m finding a lot of wisdom and teaching, and I hope it will provide some value for you too. It’s called “The Queen Bee” and I’m going to share my version of it which is based on the story as it was collected by the Brothers Grimm.
So, I invite you to sit back and relax and let the story take you where you need to go right now. Note the moments or details that catch your attention. This may be something that puzzles or delights or infuriates you—whatever it is, this is an opening into the meaning this story holds for you right now.
“The Queen Bee”
Once upon a time, two sons of a king left home to seek adventure. They fell into a wild. and reckless way of living, and gave up all thoughts of going home again. Their third and youngest brother, who was called Witling, had remained behind, but after a time he went off to look for them. When at last he found them, they jeered at his simplicity and told him that he was a total fool for thinking that he could make his way in the world, while they who were so much cleverer, had been unsuccessful.
Reunited, the three of them went on together. After a time, they came to an ant-hill. The two eldest brothers picked up sticks. They wanted to stir up the ant-hill so they could watch the poor little ants hurry about in fear, carrying off their eggs. But Witling said, “Leave the little creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be disturbed.”
The three brothers went on a little further, until they came to a lake. A number of ducks were swimming about and the two eldest brothers wanted to catch a couple and cook them. But Witling would not allow it. He said, “Leave the creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be killed.”
So the three of them traveled on and then they came to a bees nest in a tree. There was so much honey in it that it overflowed and ran down the trunk in a sticky golden stream. The two oldest brothers wanted to make a fire under the tree to stifle the bees with the smoke. Then they could get at the honey. But Witling prevented them, saying, “Leave the little creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be stifled.”
The two eldest brothers were not happy with this, but despite their grumbling the three of them continued on until they came to a castle. All was quiet. They peered into the stables and found many horses standing stock still. The horses were made of stone. Now the brothers went through all the quiet rooms, each of them devoid of life, until they came to a door at the end of a long hallway. The door was secured with three locks, and in the middle of the door there was a small opening through which they could look into the room. They peered in and saw a little grey-haired man sitting at a table. He was alive!
“Hey,” they called out to him, “come let us in.” But he didn’t hear them. They called out to him again and he still sat at his table unawares. But the third time they called out to him he got up, undid the locks, and came out. He didn’t say a word. He led them to a table loaded with all sorts of good things. When they had eaten and drunk, he showed the brothers to his bed-chamber and there they each found a bed.
The next morning the little grey -haired man came to the eldest brother, and beckoned him over to a table of stone. Carved into the table were instructions for releasing the castle from its enchantment. There were three tasks to be completed. The first task was to go into the surrounding woods and search under the moss for the pearls that belonged to the princesses. There were a thousand pearls and they were to be sought for and collected. Whoever undertook this task had to find all thousand and complete this by sunset, because if even one pearl was missing, he would be turned to stone.
So the eldest brother went out and searched all day. He looked and looked but at sunset he had only found one hundred pearls, and the inscription in the table of stone came to pass. He was turned into stone. The second brother undertook this adventure next day, but he didn’t fare any better than his older brother. He did find two hundred pearls, but only two hundred pearls, and he was also turned into stone.
Now it was Witling’s turn. He began to search in the moss but it was a very tedious business to find the pearls, and he was very slow and clumsy at it. Before long he was despondent, bored by the task and frustrated, and frightened at the prospect of failure. He sat down on a stone and began to weep. He was sitting there with his hands over his face, when up from the ground came the ant-king with five thousand ants, ants whose lives had been saved through Witling’s pity. It didn’t take the ants long to collect all of the one thousand pearls and put them in a heap at Witling’s feet.
Now the second task carved into the table of stone was to get the key to the princess’s sleeping-chamber out of the lake. Witling went to the shore of the lake without any idea of how to begin, but the ducks whose lives he had saved, came swimming. They dived below the surface and before long they found the key and brought it up from the muddy bottom.
The third task that had to be done was the most difficult. In one of the rooms there lay three princesses, all deep asleep, deep in an enchanted sleep. Wilting had to choose the youngest and loveliest of the three. But the problem was, they all bore a perfect resemblance to each other. They all looked the same. The only difference was this; before they went to sleep each one had eaten a different sweetmeat. The eldest had eaten a piece of sugar. The second had eaten a little syrup. The third and youngest, had eaten a spoonful of honey.
Witling gazed at the three still faces. He was standing there by the three beds when the Queen Bee flew into the room. She was the queen of those bees that Witling had protected from the fire. One by one, the queen tasted the lips of each princess and settled on those of the one that had eaten honey. Now the king’s son knew which princess to choose.
The spell was broken. Every one awoke from their stony sleep and took their right form again—the horses and servants, the royal family, and the two eldest brothers. Witling married the youngest and loveliest princess, and he became king after her father’s death. As for the two brothers, well they had to put up with the other two sisters.
The end.
This story contains many powerful and interesting images, metaphors that you can investigate for their symbolic meanings. It’s a superficially simple and rather short story and yet, there’s a mind-boggling number of possibilities conveyed here. I encourage you to investigate these characters; the ants, ducks, bees, and the pearls, horses etc. Whatever calls to you. Let it matter. Give it your attention and see what happens.
For now, I want to step back from the specifics and take a bigger view of the story as a whole, in order to consider what it could be “about.” I’m also going to share some thoughts about my moment in the story, which was something that really bugged me at first. Being annoyed by a detail in a story and going into it, reflecting on it, can be very fruitful! Don’t simply dismiss it and fall back on some preconceived judgment. Get curious. I share some of my experience with the story because I hope that what I glean will resonate with you, and also to help you to do this kind of work with the story yourself.
Now, Marie Louise von Franz suggests that if you want to unpack the larger themes of a fairy tale, you begin by noticing the opening situation. This is a useful bit of advice although not mandatory of course. In this story, “The Queen Bee,” we have three brothers. Three young men. The “sons of kings.” The king himself isn’t present ,and there are no women and no elders of any gender. These are the missing ingredients in this situation and the story will tell us something about this and perhaps resolve it. What are the missing ingredients? Maturity—there’s a need for a new order and revitalization, and the feminine—that is feeling and life, new life. Somehow the pieces that we need to have a functioning kingdom are tied up with the wisdom of the elders and the feminine and the maturation of these “sons.” And one clue is the fact that there isn’t actually a kingdom.
At the beginning, the “sons of the king” have left home and then later in the story, the castle that they find is inert. It’s lifeless. It’s waiting for the breath of life. It’s stone, except for that little old man. And this “kingdom” as we know, is an inner and outer situation just as the masculine and feminine is an inner and outer situation. And I do find myself wondering these days, how a country of immature people, people who operate like the two eldest brothers, are ever going to create a functioning kingdom.
Now if you look into the meanings that are attached to the various players in this story, you’ll find many associations to the goddess, to earth as mother, and to what we now call “the feminine.” It’s not just the absence of a princess. The ducks, for example, are an ancient face of the Mother Goddess. In the podcast on Aphrodite and Eros, I believe that I mentioned the myth of the great mother who was hatched from an egg that was found in the water, rolled onto shore, and then brooded by birds until it was her time to emerge. In the Middle East in particular, there are many images of the early goddess in the form of aquatic birds.
In Greek mythology, ducks are connected to Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Penelope, who spent the long years of his absence in her own incubation, weaving and unraveling her work and in this process, becoming someone new. The name “Penelope” comes from the Greek word for “duck.” When Penelope was born, her father Icarius was disappointed and angry. He wanted a son. So he tossed the infant girl into the ocean to drown. A family of ducks rescued her and her father changed his tune. He recognized this as an omen of her specialness. Interesting that the ducks in this fairy tale also rescue something of value from the water, a feminine principle from the unconscious, as a Jungian might say.
So we need to find this missing feminine, so this new order, this living kingdom, can come about.
In this story there is a male protagonist but Witling isn’t the “typical” hero, is he? This isn’t a “hero’s journey” in the way that we usually think of it. Witling doesn’t seem to have any ambition to be great or mighty or successful. He’s more of a caretaker. He’s gentle. When he grasps the futility of his search for the pearls, he gives up and weeps like Psyche in the ancient myth of Psyche and Eros. If you know that story, you know that, Psyche is given the impossible task of sorting a huge pile of seeds in a day and when she surrenders to the impossibility and sits down to cry, ants appear to do the task for her.
When I tell this story, the fact that Psyche sits down and cries often annoys people. Annoys them because they think that she should be doingsomething else. that she should be tougher and stronger, and somehow pull a solution out of thin air. And I think is part of the problem of our one-sided hammering away on this narrow view of the heroic, because although crying isn’t part of the “heroic” playbook it is a reasonable and honest response to an impossible situation. To know what you can’t do and to not only admit it to yourself, but to feel the reality of it. This is a genuine appreciation of self and situation isn’t it? And what’s interesting, is that we you are in that state, help arrives from unexpected quarters.
That this help is unexpected is very important to note. When we talk about giving up, sitting down and weeping, we talk about surrender, and surrendering to impossible situations means that you really don’t have any place to turn and no expectation of success. Surrender to impossible situations means that you really have no place to turn, no expectations. I often talk with people about difficult situations or difficult decision that they face, and the underlying despair in being boxed in, in feeling that there is no way out, gets choked off with sentiments like “Oh I know that everything will work out for the best” or “Prayers are answered,” or “I have faith…” in this, that, or the other thing, and there’s nothing wrong with this and I understand it. In many situations it’s exactly the right strategy but this isn’t surrender. This isn’t a state of no expectations, of no sense of capability. When you place faith in something that you think may still bring you what you want, as you’ve imagined it, you haven’t surrendered.
Surrender happens when you accept failure. When you move into the space and place of failure and the consequences of it. And here something miraculous occurs, something unexpected. How this happens—that it happens—is a mystery and yet there is a connection I think, between honest awareness, a sense of one’s own abilities and limitations, feeling, and character.
Witling is a different type of person, isn’t he, from his older brothers? He has different values. He has a different sensibility and so a different image of himself. Witling doesn’t see the ants and pick up a stick and say, “hey great, let’s terrorize these little insects.”
Now, as part of the formal, academic study of fairy tales, the stories are cataloged according to motif indexes. In the Aarne-Thompson index, which is one of the two commonly employed, this story is catalogued under the heading “Supernatural Helpers,” and the subheading “Grateful Animals,” which is cross referenced with another group, “Tales of Magic.” Paranthetically, the Grateful Dead got their band name by opening one of these folklore motif indexes at random and putting a finger down on the motif heading “Grateful Dead.”
I think this motif title is interesting and it’s a way into what I see as the backdrop of this story. I don’t much care for this concept of the “grateful animal” although I understand the concept, and I’m sure that you do too. The two older brothers want to kill the ants, the ducks, and the bees and the youngest intervenes on their behalf, so when he needs help, they’ve got his back. They show up for him. Yes, they are grateful but doesn’t it feel a little backwards to focus on their response rather than Witling’s actions and attitude? Couldn’t this motif be named “Recognizing Reciprocity,” for example?
I think the fact that we don’t categorize this story by some name like “recognizing reciprocity” shows us the assumptions that are part of the shadow of the Christian myth of human and particularly male, superiority. This unfounded we’ve got that only human beings possess intelligence, emotion, and soul. That we live in a world where only human beings count. So if something like an ant responds to us, oh my goodness that’s “magic!” rather than recognition from a sentient being of the like-minded appreciation for the gift of life.
We’ve created a culture of power and I think what we need, is a culture in service to life. I’m suggesting that Witling is of that sensibility and so yes, he is rewarded
The truth that I see is the reciprocity between beings, fellow creatures, that lends order to a community of sentient Others in an animate world. Do you think that there are so many stories, so many myths around the world, woven into human cultures, about this kind of partnership between humans and our fellow creatures because human beings from the earliest days of recorded history have wished and longed for such a relationship? Or is it possible, or even likely, that we have such a plethora of such stories because they contain a literal truth and possibility? Are the shamans and seekers who consult their animal guides all nuts? Are all of the animal communicators frauds? Am I crazy to experiment with my awareness of the intelligence that surrounds me, to speak, to listen, and to respond? I’ll answer that last question for you! No, I’m, not.
There are so many beautiful and profound possibilities in the old stories, and so many opportunities to learn, to expand your consciousness and sense of self, to break out of the sad conditioning of modern Western culture and test the assumptions and the half-baked theories, like this notion that we are the only intelligent beings on this planet Earth, with your own experience, against your value system. It’s exciting. It’s also a lot of work. It’s easier, more convenient, to let someone else be the authority, to go along. Safer maybe. Or is it safer these days? I don’t know. In any event, it’s a waste of your life, the gift of this life.
Whatever you think about intraspecies communication, you do sense, don’t you, the beautiful symmetry in this story, in the notion that proper union between the masculine and the feminine, the realization of a whole human being in place, embodied in a material world, is a person who is also in harmony with the rest of nature. People use the phrase “right relation,” meaning to be in right relationship to everything and everyone. That phrase is part of a spiritual path. Today this insight is associated with indigenous cultures and in my case, I learned this from exposure to Native American teachings. And yet, we all have indigenous roots in some part of the world, and even the great machine of the West, powered by the twin engines of Christian dogma and scientism, is not as monolithic or disconnected as we are taught to believe.
This spiritual instruction, “be in right relationship,” this view of the world as a diverse community of beings with inherent value and right to life, isn’t that the context for this story?
What prevents this exploration, this openness to this adventure, in your life, do you think? There might be a lot of answers to that question. If there is indeed a singular path for each one of us in this life—that was one of the messages in the last podcast from “The Conference of the Birds”—than each of us is making a journey that no one else can duplicate or understand. That said, one obstacle that I see and experience in my life, to openness to the possibility there is a recognition of reciprocity, not only in Witling but also in the bees and ducks and ants, is the often unconscious habit of overestimating yourself, your knowledge, skill, power, and your value in the grand scheme. We are schooled in this my friends.
In this story, we’ve got the two older brothers. They believe that they’re clever. They disparage their younger brother, presumably because they think he’s soft and sensitive. They believe they had the right to terrorize the ants, kill the ducks, rob the bees. They don’t have any respect. Did you notice that their actions are not motivated by need? They didn’t day “we’ve been traveling for days and days without eating and we’re hungry so let’s kill a duck.” It’s more like, what do you do with ducks? Oh, you kill a couple. This sense that I will destroy, disturb, and rob because I can, that power dynamic again. Power that’s not in service to life.
There’s a tremendous insecurity in this hubris. Where is your root in you live cut off from nature? And therefore cut off from your own nature. If you live trying to compensate for this lack of wholeness and humanity through other satisfactions, numbness, overwork, and denial of the inevitable, that is the natural cycles and especially the natural cycle of growth, maturation, aging, and death.
I said that I would tell you about my moment in the story. I didn’t like the ending words, that the two older brothers had to “put up with the other two sisters.’ As far as I was concerned, the sisters got the booby prize with these two callous brothers as husbands and yet, as I thought about it, well, this all fits because we’re are not all equal in awareness, maturity, and wisdom. We are all on this quest for the proper relationship between masculine and feminine, all genders, we all need to bring these things into balance. We are all in need of this inner marriage whether we know it or not, and need the harmonious expression of this union in the psyche, in the personality, and in life…
My dislike of the ending words sent me back to the story and consideration of the differences between the three sisters. The brothers are different. the two eldest brothers think they’re clever and they want to wreck things, and Witling is sensitive and kind and has this respect for the lives of others. So what are the differences between the three sisters?
Witling, the youngest brother, must identify the youngest and loveliest of the three sisters. Maybe you bridle at this “loveliest and youngest” business and yet we are talking about the inner marriage between the youngest, about fresh life, about turning what was stone into flesh again. And there’s a fantastic clue in this story to the deeper significance of these qualities, namely, Witling can’t tell which of the sisters is the youngest and loveliest by looking at them. Outwardly they look the same. This isn’t a measure of outer qualities, of the surface and surface meaning. The youth and beauty point to qualities of soul, spirit, and character, to the innocence and vitality, the kindness and wisdom. They point to the need for Witling to find his feminine counterpart.
And how is this young woman going to be identified? Each of them ate something sweet and the Queen Bee finds the one who ate honey. So what is different is the sweetness on their lips, and the one who ate the honey, she’s the one. The Queen bee, like other characters in this story, has a long mythological connection to the Mother Goddess, to fertility, abundance, the life force. Honey is liquid gold, solidified sunlight, ambrosia, the food of the gods, and as the producers of this glorious substance, bees were linked by the Greeks to the Muse, poetic inspiration, and the oracles. The priestess at the Oracle at Delphi was called “The Delphic Bee.”
Honey, what a substance. It is the key ingredient in mead and was often added to wine and beer, and to soma, balché, to mention only a few of the known beverages that have been utilized over the centuries for recreation and also for more serious pursuit of states of altered consciousness. And what about the evocation of paradise in the phrase “milk and honey.” The great gift of these two different and complementary life-sustaining substances is appreciated, revered—or was- in every culture that possessed both. Honey is a healer, the basis of ointments and salves, and honey was used to preserve the body after death. So much inspiration, so much food, found in this “simple” fairy tale.
You know, a queen bee is not a tyrant. She’s selected and created by the group, and she serves them as they serve her. Bees are rightfully honored by those who live in right relationship, with awareness of reciprocity, for their industriousness and efficiency, and cleanliness. As pollinators and as food source for other insects and birds, bees are one of the most important beings in the food chain. Their well-being and survival is essential to, and to the continuation of most of the life on earth as we know it. Once again, there is this melding of material and metaphorical truth, what is often called fact and fiction, and that is the power and gift of these old stories.
Metaphor and information. This has been a terrible, terrible, week in the United States, a terrible week after many other terrible weeks, a time of rage and weeping. There’s one more lesson that I want to share with you, that I’ve gleaned from the bees, and it’s found in a poem that I saw in Orionmagazine from summer 2018, written by Tess Taylor titled, “On Not Posting the Bees to Instagram.”
Click here for the text of the poem on Tess Taylor’s website
Joy my friends, this our challenge and our task in these times.
That’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments about today’s program. If you are new to Myth Matters, I invite you head over to the Mythic Mojo website where you’ll find information about Myth Matters and a variety of ways to subscribe to this podcast. You can listen from your favorite platform, like Itunes or google play, etc.
I am very grateful to all of you who support this program by sharing it with other people and spreading the word about what we’re doing here at Myth Matters. And I am deeply doubly grateful to those of you who are able to provide some financial support to this podcast. Special thanks this week to Julie Ehret and Lauren Vuylsteke for joining the Myth Matters community on bandcamp.
Thank you so much for listening! Please tune in next time and until then, happy myth-making and keep the mystery in your life alive.
If you like this podcast, you may appreciate Orion. Orion is a quarterly magazine of “Nature, Culture, and Place,” publishing works that support this mission:
“It is Orion’s fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.”
