With the threat to the planet – nature is much in our minds, and the importance of bees.
In old times, the management of bees was universally understood, and many householders kept bees in their gardens.
The hospitallers in Kells were no exception. Possibly where the bees were kept was close to the Carrick Street side of the monastery.
So important were bees, that the High King Cormac mac Airt, the Lawgiver, who moved his royal residence to Kells, assured that bees were enshrined in the Irish law system, the Brehon Law.
The Bee-Judgements occupied around 20 pages of the Brehon Law tract. In Irish the name for bee is “beacha” and a hive is “coirceog”. For example, if a man or woman found a coirceog in the green surrounding and belonging to a house, a quarter of the produce to the end of a year was due to the finder, and the remaining three quarters to the owner of the house.
Further in the Law – if the finder came across the coirceog in a waste land not belonging to an individual, but the common property of the tribe, the bees and honey belonged to the finder, except one-ninth to the chief of the tribe.
And so on. The Law was very specific.
And for newlyweds – what better place to honeymoon than in Ireland? In Gaelic, “honeymoon” is “mi na meala,” meaning “the month of honey.” The newlyweds celebrated their wedding by drinking mead (made out of fermented honey) for a month.
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