Bees have always carried a sense of mystery.
Yes, they pollinate our gardens and make honey, but there is something about them that feels older than agriculture, older than language, older than our modern impulse to turn every living thing into a product or wellness trend. Their hum feels like a doorway. Their hive feels like a temple. Their medicines, honey, venom, wax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly, hold both physical and spiritual teachings.
In our most recent podcast conversation with Courtney Cosgriff, beekeeper, herbalist, medicine maker, and founder of Honeybee Herbals, we explored the deeper world of bees: not just as pollinators or honey producers, but as ancient teachers of devotion, protection, nourishment, boundaries, ecology, and right relationship.
For those who want to listen to the episode- it was a really good one!- here is the link!
Courtney has spent the last 15 years following the path of the bees through natural beekeeping, apitherapy, herbal medicine, mythology, ancient cultures, and spiritual relationship with the hive. Her work invites us to slow down and ask better questions.
What does it mean to tend bees rather than keep them? What does ethical honey harvesting actually require? How can we connect with bees without extracting from them? And what might the hive teach us about living in deeper reciprocity with the earth?
Courtney’s Initiation into the World of Bees
Courtney’s path with bees did not begin with a childhood dream of becoming a beekeeper. It began through synchronicity, dreams, near-death experiences, and what she describes as an otherworldly calling.
At 18, Courtney experienced two serious car accidents within two weeks. After the first accident, where the car she was in flipped in the middle of the night, she remembers looking up at the stars with a profound sense of gratitude to still be alive. Soon after, while traveling through Portland, she encountered a man carrying a briefcase painted with a bee. Inside were hive medicines: propolis, pollen, honey, and writings about how bee medicines were used in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt.
Two weeks later, Courtney was in a second accident when a wasp flew into her eye while she was driving. After that, bees began appearing everywhere- in waking life, in dreams, and in strange moments of synchronicity. Eventually, someone asked her if she had ever considered becoming a beekeeper. Something clicked- it was an initiation.
Courtney eventually began studying natural beekeeping, but her path was not straightforward. She encountered the dominant paradigm of modern beekeeping: industrial, commercial, human-centered, and often disconnected from the spiritual and ecological nature of the bees. As a young woman entering a largely male-dominated field, she felt a tension between what she was being taught and what her intuition was telling her about the bees.
Over time, this led her toward bee-centric beekeeping, a way of tending bees that centers the needs, biology, ecology, and spiritual significance of the hive rather than the human desire for honey, productivity, or control.
Bees, Priestesses, and the Feminine Mysteries
One of the most fascinating threads Courtney shared is the ancient connection between bees and the feminine mysteries.
In Greek, the word Melissa means bee. In parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, priestesses who served temples of the Mother Goddess were known as Melissae, or “bee women.” Courtney has followed this thread through ancient Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and other regions where bees were woven into mythology, ritual, temple culture, and sacred relationship with the earth.
This connection is not arbitrary. When we look closely at the hive, the feminine symbolism becomes clear.
The hive is warm, dark, protected, and devoted to the creation and nourishment of life. Before bees were placed into wooden boxes, they lived inside hollow trees, caves, and cavities within the earth. Like the womb, the hive is a dark chamber where life is formed, fed, and protected. This is one reason ancient cultures associated bees with creation, birth, death, regeneration, and the sacred feminine.
Courtney also reframes the language commonly used to describe bees. Rather than calling them “worker bees,” she calls them sister bees. This may seem like a small shift, but language matters. “Worker bee” reflects an industrial mindset, one that views the bees through the lens of labor and production. “Sister bee” restores relationship, kinship, and reverence.
Within the hive, there is the mother, often called the queen. There are the sisters, who make up most of the hive and tend to nearly every aspect of life: building comb, foraging, cleaning, feeding the young, guarding the hive, and caring for the mother. Then there are the drones, the male bees, whose role is connected to reproduction and the movement of genetic information between hives.
Seen through this lens, the hive is not a factory. It is a living temple of devotion.
The Hive Medicines: More Than Bee Products
Modern culture often refers to honey, beeswax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, and venom as “bee products.” Courtney invites us to question that language. These substances are not simply commodities. They are sacred medicines created through the relationship between bees, plants, trees, flowers, land, and season.
As herbalists and plant people, we often talk about plant medicine in terms of relationship. We ask where a plant grows, what it tastes like, what tissues it affects, what energetics it carries, and how to harvest it ethically. Courtney brings that same reverence to the hive medicines.
Each substance has a role within the hive, a medicinal action in the body, and a deeper teaching for those willing to listen.
Beeswax: The Architecture of the Hive
Beeswax is the structure of the hive. It is the comb, the body, the architecture, the place where baby bees are born and honey is stored. Bees create wax through their own bodies after ingesting nectar, secreting tiny wax scales from glands on their abdomen.
Humans have worked with beeswax for thousands of years in candles, salves, ritual, ceremony, and divination. Courtney shared that beeswax candles have long been used in sacred rites, not simply because they are beautiful, but because wax itself carries a connection to the hive, to light, to prayer, and to the unseen.
In her work, beeswax becomes more than an ingredient. It becomes a medium for connection- with ancestors, spirit, mystery, and the body of the hive itself.
Bee Venom: Boundaries, Protection, and Initiation
Bee venom is one of the most powerful and misunderstood medicines of the hive.
Physically, venom has been used in bee venom therapy, a form of apitherapy that requires significant training, caution, and respect. Courtney emphasized that venom is not something to casually experiment with or treat as a social media wellness trend. Bee venom can cause serious allergic reactions and, in some cases, can be life-threatening.
Spiritually, venom teaches boundaries.
Venom is the hive saying, “You have come too close.” It is not random aggression. It is protection of what is sacred. Courtney spoke beautifully about how the bees have taught her to hold both honey and venom, both sweetness and sting.
This is a teaching many of us need. Especially in healing work, caregiving, motherhood, business ownership, and community life, there can be pressure to be endlessly available, endlessly sweet, endlessly giving. The hive reminds us that sweetness requires protection. Devotion requires discernment. Love requires boundaries.
The hive is not only honey. It is also venom.
Propolis: The Immune System of the Hive
Propolis is one of the most beloved hive medicines in herbalism. Bees make propolis from tree resins, mixing them with wax to create a sticky, aromatic, antimicrobial substance used to seal, protect, and fortify the hive.
Courtney describes propolis as part of the immune system of the hive. It helps protect against pathogens, supports the structural integrity of the hive, and creates a medicinal barrier between the inner world of the bees and the outside environment.
Propolis also reminds us that bees are not only in relationship with flowers. They are in relationship with trees. In wild hives, especially those inside hollow tree cavities, bees live within a larger ecology of wood, resin, fungi, microbes, insects, and land. The hive is not separate from the forest. The hive belongs to the forest.
For humans, propolis is often used for immune support, sore throats, oral health, and microbial defense. But on a deeper level, it teaches protection through relationship. True immunity is not isolation. It is belonging to a healthy ecology.
Pollen and Bee Bread: Fertility and Nourishment
Pollen is the primary protein source for the hive. Bees gather pollen from flowers and bring it back to the hive, where it is transformed into bee bread- a mixture of pollen, nectar, honey, enzymes, and microbial activity.
Courtney distinguishes between commercially sold bee pollen and bee bread. Much of the bee pollen available in stores is collected using pollen traps that knock pollen off the bees’ legs as they enter the hive. From Courtney’s perspective, this raises ethical questions, because pollen is not extra. It is food for the bees and essential nourishment for the developing young.
Bee bread, on the other hand, is pollen that has been transformed by the bees and stored in the comb. Courtney generally works with hive medicines like bee bread only when they become available through natural circumstances, such as a hive that has died, rather than creating conditions for extraction.
Pollen and bee bread teach us about nourishment, reproduction, fertility, and the immense intelligence of the hive.
Royal Jelly: The Food of the Queen
Royal jelly is another powerful and often misunderstood hive medicine. It is secreted by the sister bees and fed to young larvae. The queen, or mother bee, receives royal jelly throughout her life, and this nourishment supports her extraordinary fertility and longevity.
Royal jelly is rich in amino acids, B vitamins, and other nutrients, but Courtney cautions against the casual use of royal jelly in supplements, skincare, and beauty products. Harvesting royal jelly often involves disrupting queen cells, and once again, the ethical question becomes: what did this medicine cost the hive?
This is one of the most important teachings from the conversation. Just because something is natural does not mean it is automatically ethical.
Just because something is medicinal does not mean we are entitled to it.
Honey: Sacred Food, Not Just a Sweetener
Honey may be the most familiar hive medicine, but Courtney’s perspective invites us to see it with fresh reverence.
Honey begins as nectar, gathered from flowers by the sister bees. The nectar is stored in the bee’s honey stomach, brought back to the hive, passed between bees, transformed through enzymatic activity, placed into the comb, fanned to reduce moisture, and sealed with wax.
Honey is not made for humans. It is made by the bees for the bees.
It feeds the hive through winter and through seasons when nectar is not available. It provides energy, warmth, and survival. Honeycomb also insulates the hive. When humans take too much honey and replace it with sugar water, we are not offering an equal exchange. We are removing a complex, living food and replacing it with something nutritionally and energetically inferior.
Courtney reminds us that honey has long been understood as sacred food. In ancient cultures, it was used in ritual, ceremony, offerings, and medicine. It was not simply something to stir into tea without thought. It was the food of the gods, a reflection of land and season, a collaboration between flower and bee.
Honey is sunlight, rain, mineral, nectar, wing, enzyme, flower, field, and devotion- an entire landscape in a spoonful.
Natural Beekeeping and Right Relationship
Courtney’s approach to natural beekeeping is rooted in relationship rather than extraction. She does not buy packages of bees or reproduce queens for production. Instead, she works with bees already living in her bioregion and focuses on creating conditions that support their health and natural behavior.
This includes studying wild hives, tree nests, log hives, and the natural nesting preferences of bees. Courtney shared that encountering a wild hive in a cottonwood tree changed her understanding of bees. It reminded her that much of what humans know about honeybee behavior comes from studying bees in man-made environments.
But a hive in a box is not the same as a hive in a tree.
Bee-centric beekeeping asks different questions. What do bees need? How do they live when we are not constantly intervening? How can we support them without forcing them into systems designed primarily for human convenience and honey production?
This is where the conversation becomes relevant far beyond beekeeping. Whether we are working with herbs, bees, land, food, or community, the question remains: are we in relationship, or are we extracting?
How to Connect with Bees Without Becoming a Beekeeper
One of Courtney’s clearest teachings is that you do not need to become a beekeeper to support bees. In fact, the idea that “saving the bees” means getting a hive can be misleading.
Honeybees are not native to North America, though they are naturalized and deeply woven into our food system. There are thousands of native bee species in North America, many of whom are also in need of habitat, food, and protection.
So what is the best way to support bees? Grow flowers.
Plant native plants, create pollinator habitat, let your yard become a place of nourishment. Feed not just honeybees, but native bees, butterflies, moths, birds, and the wider web of pollinators.
Before honey, there must be flowers. Before harvest, there must be habitat. Before taking, there must be tending.
What the Bees Ask Us to Remember
Bees are often spoken about in terms of what they do for us- they pollinate our food, they make honey, provide wax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, and venom. But Courtney’s work asks us to shift the center of the conversation.
What if bees are not here simply to be useful to humans? What if they are beings with their own intelligence, ecology, needs, and spiritual significance? What if the medicines of the hive are not products, but teachings? What if honey is not just sweetness, but relationship?
The bees teach devotion, but not self-abandonment. They teach sweetness, but not without boundaries. They teach nourishment, but not without labor. They teach protection, but not isolation. They teach community, but not conformity. They teach us that life depends on interdependence.
To listen to the bees is to remember that the world is alive, relational, and worthy of reverence.