In addition to the diverse gardens, it would have been customary for a medieval monastery to keep honeybees. We have a hive on the neighboring Hildegard Haus property. The bees were highly valued for their honey as well as wax, or honeycomb. The entry in Hildegard’s work, Physica (in the first book on plants), offers several cautions to consuming straight honey or honeycomb, however, there are a number of passing references to using honey together with various herbs in other entries at other places within Physica. For example, she recommends cooking parsley in wine, together with a bit of vinegar and honey, to assist with a number of ailments. There are also a number of recommended topical uses, including adding it to mugwort juice and applying to an infected (poisoned) wound.  Honey remains a popular remedy today for internal as well as topical use.

In addition to practical uses / applications of honey and honey bee products, Hildegard often used the image of honey, honeycomb, and/or a hive allegorically (at times taken directly from the psalms). Below are a few examples of how she included references to honeybees in her theological work, The Book of Divine Works, Vision I.4:

“Indeed, in the human body the soul dwells according to what it finds in its humors, like a bee working within the vessel of the honeycomb, producing honey that is sometimes clear and sometimes murky…” (157)

“For the soul, which was sent by God’s spirit into the body, floods it entirely with its powers. As the winds’ blasts roam within the firmament, so the soul causes a person to love God most ardently and to enact the holiest virtues, which taste of honey for the sayings of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb of his mouth!” (178)

“Likewise, the earth is graced to flourish in summer through viridity, and afterward is turned pale in winter by the cold. For when the soul has so overcome its body that they agree in good will with a simple heart and enjoy good works like delicious food, that person says in heavenly desire, ‘How sweet in my throat are the words of yoru justice, which are even far sweeter in my mouth than honey!'” (202)

“For the earth exists within the midst of the atmosphere like the honeycomb amid the honey… And so a person’s works are like the earth, which the atmosphere holds above and below and on every side; and the soul exists with the body like the atmosphere with the earth and the honeycomb amid the honey” (203).

“With every part of creation that came from God, the soul is at work in a person, so that, as bees build a honeycomb within their hive, so too a person accomplishes her/his work like a honeycomb within the soul’s knowledge, which is like nectar” (241).

The following antiphon, Favus distillans (A dripping honeycomb) is preserved in St. Hildegard’s Symphonia (translated by Dr. Barbara Newman 1998) and performed by Rebecca Fasanello in the Hildegard Haus.

A dripping honeycomb was Ursula, virgin, who yearned to embrace the Lamb of God, honey and milk beneath her tongue.

For she gathered to herself a fruitful garden and the choicest flowers in a flock of virgins. So rejoice, daughter of Zion, in the most noble dawn.

For she gathered to herself a fruitful garden, and the choicest flowers in a flock of virgins.