The mystery of icon-preserving bees
For a decade, a beekeeper near Athens, has kept a tradition: every spring, he slips icons of Christ, the Holy Virgin and different saints in his beehives, in order to bless his bees and his yearly honey production. And every year, the very same mysterious phenomenon occurs: bees make their honeycomb cells around the pious images, meticulously avoiding covering them.
My first thought was that the colors used for the faces and bodies of these icons might discourage the bees in a way that the backgrounds do not. Although this story makes it a little more interesting:
Once I brought a handmade icon from a convent, that represented Golgotha with three crosses. Bees “embroidered” with wax the entire surface of the composition, leaving one to clearly perceive the Cross of Christ and the Thief at his right hand while the thief on the left cross was covered with a thick layer of wax.
The gospels say Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves; Matthew and Mark briefly mention that the thieves mocked him, but Luke 23 specifies that one of them rebuked the other and showed penitence. Tradition places the penitent thief to Jesus’s right. Frankly, all three crosses are hard to make out in the picture, but the one to the right (Jesus’s left) is definitely the most obscured.
I wouldn’t call it a miracle or anything, but it’s at least more interesting than the average “Virgin Mary found on a potato chip” story.
