• It’s early September, the season when our thoughts wistfully turn to loafing or summer partying one last time on Labor Day weekend.
• 2,000 years ago, that was not the case. The Greco-Roman calendar was crowded with “labor day” festivals–more often than not, honoring a specific occupation and its patron god or goddess.
• There were exceptions. In May, an extravagant shindig for the god Mercury, patron of merchants, orators, pro athletes, and travelers, took place. Although we’re used to seeing Mercury wearing wings on his feet and not much else, in ancient times, this messenger deity accessorized with a money purse. As the god of trade and commercial success, merchants made pilgrimages to Mercury’s well in Rome during his festival, to douse  themselves and their goods with that lucky water.
•  Minerva, known as Athena in Greece, also played patron goddess to countless workers and their careers, from horn players and teachers to artists and doctors.
• At the opposite extreme, the association of beekeepers held their own sting-free festival bash. Their headliners? Mellona, the mellow Roman goddess of bees and honey; and Melisseus, a much more ancient “bee-man” divinity from pre-Olympian Greek mythology.
• Those early deities knew how to play hardball. When Zeus was an infant, Melisseus and his good-hearted daughters hid him away from his father, a Titan named Cronos. Dad had eating disorder issues, you see. Cronos craved baby flesh, especially his own kin. As legend had it, bee-man Melisseus and company fostered little Zeus on milk and honey until the kid got old enough to become CEO of Olympus.
• Back on planet earth, when not getting buzzed at their own festivals, most Greek and Roman apiarists went the extra mile
for their bees. If local plants weren’t flowering sufficiently, industrious beekeepers would take a hike with their hives. In Italy each night, men placed their hives aboard boats and took them miles upstream. At dawn, the bees would swarm out to feed.
When the boats began to sit low in the water, the apiarists knew that their busy charges had filled the honeycombs. In Roman Spain, beekeepers labored even harder, sometimes hauling their bees from place to place—on muleback.
• In case you’re wondering: ancient beehives were made of tightly woven reeds, daubed with mud and leaves. Or from cork, or bark, or even dried dung. But most agreed that the very best hives were made of ferula—a species of giant fennel plant. With finicky care, beekeepers wove the fennel stems around a wooden framework. So strong and lightweight were the ferula hives, and so perfectly did they keep the bees cool, that they continued to be the sine qua non of hive architecture from ancient times up until the 1990s.
• In the sugarless Mediterranean world of 2000 years ago, you’d think that humans would value honey most highly as a sweetener. That role, however, was secondary. Honey, the food of the gods from toddler Zeus on down, had religious significance. And it was even more prized for its healing and preservative powers—to the extent  that Alexander the Great and lesser lights demanded to be mellified, or embalmed in honey.
• Just as bees drink nectar from many flowers, so too this post draws from varied sources: a snippet from “Roman Holidays,” an op-ed piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times on 9-3-2007; part from the entry on beekeepers in my 2007 book, Working IX to V; and other morsels from entries in my newest book, How to Mellify a Corpse.
• Stay tuned later in September for more sweet sips about honeybees. And some mighty odd beliefs about their reproduction, bee-sides.

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