Bees also figure heavily in the Finnish cosmology.
 
In the Kalevala, the epic poem of creation of the world, doings of the gods
and heros of Suomi, etc., bees are sacred servants of the Finnish mother-
goddess.
 
In something like the Finnish version of the Osiris myth, her son
Lemminkaninen (the Finnish god of love and chaos, sort of an offhand Loki
sort) has done something stupid and gotten himself killed and his body
parts tossed into the bottom of the Whirlpool of Manala, the Finnish
equivalent of the river Styx.  Mother rakes all the parts and pieces out of
the whirlpool, and sets about reassembling him.  She calls in all the
departmentalized deities to knit back together flesh and bone, restore
blood and circulation, etc.  When she is finished, she has a living shell
of her son, but the conciousness is absent.  Conciousness is not the
province of earth-based gods; thought and conciousness belong to Ukko the
Unknowable, who dwells in the highest levels of Jumala (think of layered
heavens), and is beyond the reach and knowing even of the gods.  So she
summons her servant, the bee, and tells him that he must fly to the highest
level of Jumala and bring back the honey that contains conciousness from
the realms of Ukko.  (The female orientation of most bees wasn't known when
this myth was being created.)
 
So, with the blessings of the mother-goddess, the bee flies off to the
realms of Jumala.  Higher and higher, he flies, beyond the realms reachable
by mortals, beyond the realms reachable by heros, beyond the realms reachable
by the gods themselves.  In the highest levels reachable by the gods, he
stops to rest for a short while, for the journey is becoming arduous.  Rested,
he flies onward, ever upward into more rarified realms, until finally, the
only one of all creatures to do so, he barely reaches the realm of Ukko the
Unknowable, and acquires three sips of the honey of conciousness.  This he
stows in his honey stomach and flies back to the realms of gods and mortals.
There, he places the three sips of the honey of conciousness into the mouth
of Lemminkaninen, and the unwise and unruly god awakens again, his thought
and conciousness restored by the ministrations of the bee, unfortunately
none the wiser for his misadventure.
 
The bee, ever since, has been the only being of earth that has ever visited
the highest realms of Jumala, and returned with the experience of it.  Thus,
it has a special place in the sacred cosmos, having an understanding of the
universe beyond that of the gods themselves.
 
  --Jane Beckman  [[log in to unmask]]