The Warrior Bees

I wanted to talk about the Virgil's symbol of the bees which is similar to the bee simile in the Iliad. In Homer's bee simile in the Iliad he is describing the King's and their warriors in a cluster "fluttering in swarms together this way and that way" (2.90). In this simile the bees are in swarms and dangerous, however, there are only forming groups and marching not really acting in a hostile manner.

In the Aeneid, Virgil uses two bee similes one which appears in the prophecy given to Latinus when he is worrying about the marriage of his daughter. The simile begins simply as a portent at the laurel tree, with "bees/ in a thick swarm, born through the limpid air/ with humming thunder, clustered high on top/" (7.85-87). Here the bees are in a swarm that is discordant and their noise is described as thunder which shows that it is a foreshadowing of war and uphevel that causes them to group together. This omen becomes a simile for the future events of Turnus and his men grouping together to fight Aeneas who is the "stranger advent" (7.91) whom the soothsayer tells Latinus of and the cause for the bees swarming.

Another bee simile shows up during Aeneas's time in the underworld. Here Aeneas views a thousand nations who are compared to "bees in meadows at the height of summer/ hover and home on flowers and thickly swarm on snow-white lilies, and the countryside/ Is loud with humming" (6.948). This description of the bees has them not as warriors but docile bees swarming and in contrast to the previous simile the bees are humming in a countryside setting as opposed to thundering.