Swarm Charms: Magic Spells to Control Bees

It wasn't easy being a beekeeper in the medieval Europe, but the honey that bees produced was exceptionally expensive and worth the effort. Instead of beehives with removable frames, bees were kept in woven baskets called skeps. Harvesting the honey meant scooping everything out of the skep, which destroyed the colony. So skeps were small, which encouraged the bees to swarm, looking for a new home when their numbers outgrew the skep. When that happened, beekeepers had to be ready to gather them up and lodge them in a new skep. That process involved throwing dust on the bees, banging metal objects together (called tanging), and reciting magical incantations. These were called swarm charms.

That's a lot of work to reproduce a hive, but it worked more often than not. Beekeepers were loathe to experiment to determine what part of that process actually did the job, as they didn't want to risk failure. Modern beekeepers say it was probably the dust, although things are much easier now that we've learned to identify and relocate queen bees. Read about swarm charms and the difficult medieval practice of beekeeping at Atlas Obscura.