An ecological Celtic legend

Bees and The worst year to "be" alive

Dear fellow Misfits,

Sometimes the writer’s life includes (what feels like) some very fruitless and wasted hours.

Several months ago, I spent hours doing research to prepare a pitch for a magazine calling for submissions on unusual folklore or fairytales.

My pitch was rejected. Which was obviously disappointing.

Besides those unpaid hours, one of the biggest reasons I was sad was that I genuinely loved my pitch. I wanted to write the piece. But because the magazine didn’t want it, that would mean more unpaid hours.

Since I’m not actually going to write the entire piece (unless someone is willing to pay me for it), I thought it was interesting enough to share the main idea here.

So, I hope you enjoy this unpaid bit of legend/folklore/hagiography. Have a great weekend.

Christiana

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A Celtic legend about bees and the “worst year to be alive”

Bees have long held mythic status in Celtic folklore. The Irish goddess Brigid—who was eventually syncretized with the Catholic saint of the same name—was associated with bees. In Celtic mythology, if a bee was close by after death, it symbolized that the soul had departed the body. Bees were often represented as wise messengers between worlds. 

According to legend and Catholic hagiography, bees were brought to Ireland by a monk with a strange name: Modomnoc, or “little Dominick.”

Modomnoc kept bees in a Welsh monastery under an abbot named David, who later became the patron saint of Wales. While the other monks were afraid of the bees because they stung everyone but Modomnoc, the little monk was known to speak to the bees in his garden, coaxing them to produce an abundance of honey for the monastery.

When God called Modomnoc back to his native Ireland to spread the gospel, he was hearbroken to leave his bees. His fellow monks surrounded him in prayer and then he set off to sail. There are numerous illustrations and retellings of what happened next.

A few miles from the coast of Wales, Modomnoc and his crew looked back to see a black cloud following their boat. It was the little monk’s entire swarm of bees. They flew toward their friend and settled beside him on the boat. Not matter how much he cajoled and coaxed them, they wouldn't return to their hives. After seeing the fear of his fellow sailors and knowing the loss that the bees would be to the monastery, Modomnoc was forced to turn the boat and head back to Wales. 

When they reached the monastery, the bees returned to their hive.

Every time they tried the journey, the swarm of bees followed Modomnoc. Abbot David finally told Modomnoc and the sailors that if the bees were to follow them again, then they would go with his blessing.

On his final attempt, Modomnoc and his sailors let the bees come. The bees rested peacefully in the corner of the boat throughout the voyage.

Modomnoc brought his bees to his native Ireland, setting up a church in Bremore near Balbriggan in County Dublin and placed the bees happily in the monastery garden.

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This delightful legend claims that Modomnoc brought bees to Ireland in the 6^th century. But is this story true?

According to Ireland’s National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the third century geographer Solinus wrote that Ireland had ‘few bees’ at that time. Other sources place bees in Ireland after the 600s when the Brechbetha, old Irish laws on beekeeping, had provisions both to protect beekeepers and those who might be stung by them.

Ecological evidence that Modomnoc could’ve brought bees to Ireland comes from what Professor Michael McCormick termed “the worst year to be alive.” In 2019, the Goelet Professor of Medieval History and Chair of the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, claimed that the year 536 C. E. was the worst year to be alive.

Here’s what happened that year.

A volcano in Iceland erupted, dimming the sun for 18 months and causing summer temperatures to drop. In 541, bubonic plague came to the Roman port of Pelusium, opening the way for the Plague of Justinian which killed a third to a half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and “hastening its collapse.” The decade that followed saw the coldest on record in 2000 years and devastated crops in as far flung places as China, Scandinavia, and, you guessed it, Ireland.

Modomnoc was born in the early 500s and died in 550, which would make his bee journey likely after or during the “worst year to be alive.” Even if bees had existed in Ireland before this time, it is possible that Modomnoc was bringing bees back to a country whose bee population had been recently devastated by the ecological disaster.

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The current state of beekeeping in Ireland is precarious. A plague called varrora disease has been threatening the bee population. Recently, scientists have begun breeding honeybees to resist it. Whether they will be successful remains to be seen.

In The Celtic Book of Days, a meditation book that draws on the ancient wisdom of Celtic saints, the author Robert Simpson uses the story of Modomnoc to make the point that blessing other people often means we have to give up something precious to us. For the author, this lesson came from David giving the monastery’s bees to Modomnoc so that he might share them with Ireland.

But I suspect that bees themselves also can teach us something. Just as the monastery that sent Modomnoc off with the bees was focused on what was good for others, the bees themselves offer a lesson to us of working for the whole. We shouldn’t make too fine a point: we are not bees. But bees give up their lives for the good of queen and therefore the good of all the hive.

If scientists are successful in staving off disease from the bees of Ireland and humanity does indeed survive long enough for legends to be written about us, what stories will develop of people who gave up their precious things in order for humanity to survive?

It will take each of us giving up more than we are accustomed to giving for the good of the ecological world. Whether it is true or not, we have a lot to learn from the legend of Modomnoc and his bees.

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More Modomnoc:

• The goofiest Modomnoc.

• The most like Gandalf (click on the thumbnail one the website)

• The most ginger

• The most historically inaccurate depiction

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My books:

Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics