Home › Curious Customs and Beliefs in Modern › Curious Customs and Beliefs in Modern: Browny

Curious Customs and Beliefs in Modern: Browny

In Cornwall the people call "Browny, Browny," when their bees swarm, believing the goblin Browny will prevent the bees from leaving.

In Monmouthshire, England, the peasantry are said to entertain so great a veneration for their bees that they go to the hives on Christmas eve at twelve o'clock in order to listen to their humming. The bees are believed to make a much more agreeable music then than at any other time, since they celebrate in the best way they can the morning of Christ's nativity.

Sheep and bees were considered sure sources of wealth, hence, - "Who shall keep well sheep and been, Sleep or wake, their thrift comes in."

Embalming the dead in honey seems still to be practised, for the Burmese preserve bodies temporarily in honey during the rainy season when it is difficult to get the fire necessary for cremation.

The relation between bees and love in the modern world is, like the bees in the Hindu myths, connected with the Curious Customs and Beliefs moon, though it is probable the present "honeymoon" bears no relation to the Hindu satellite and its myths. The orbit of the modern honeymoon is by common consent agreed to be one of great and non-astronomical eccentricity, to which Hood thus does justice: - "The moon, the moon, so silver and cold, Her fickle temper has often been told -- Now shady - now bright and sunny; But of all the lunar things that change, The one that shows most fickle and strange, And takes the most eccentric range, Is the moon - so called - of honey!"

Bees appear frequently in modern love-songs, and Chaucer in the "Miller's Tale," describes a lover's wooing during which "He syngeth brokkynge as a nightingale, He sente hir pyment,¹ meeth 2 and spiced ale."

In the same tale the enraptured swain exclaims, - "What do ye, hony comb, sweete Alisoun, My faire bryd, my sweete cynamome?"

While Spenser in the "Fairy Queen" gives us anything but a sunny picture of the condition induced by Kama and Cupid, - "True be it said, whatever man it said, That love with gall and honey doth abound; But if the one be with the other weighed, For every dram of honey therein found A pound of gall doth over it redound."

In a different vein Shakespeare in "Henry IV." makes Falstaff cry out to the Prince, — "And is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench ?" 1 Wine and honey. 2 Mead.

To which the jovial Prince replies, - "As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle."