About

Ask the Wild Bee what the Druids know.  Welcome to Ask the Wild Bee, a website dedicated to Apis mellifera, the ever-wild honeybee. My name is Narelle Bouthillier.  After a tour through academia where I earned a Bachelor’s degree (Smith College ‘00) and Masters (Harvard Divinity School ‘04) in the study of comparative religion, health and healing, I am now an eternal student of the mysteries.

Ask the Wild Bee was inspired by P.L. Travers (author of the Mary Poppins books), from her 1981 essay ‘What the Bee Knows’ (published in What the Bee Knows:  Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story, London: Penguin Arkana, 1993) where she tells us:  “as the myth descends into Time and becomes the tales that old wives tell, we hear of the ‘Wisdom of the Bees’ and the ‘Secret Knowledge of the Bees,’ and are counselled, in Scottish Highland stories, to ‘ask the Wild bee what the Druids knew’” (p. 81). Each article, interview, book review or musing you find here — be it about bees, oracles, shamanism, esotericism, mythology or one of the many threads of the Mystery — is as the bee visiting a particular flower where she explores, probes, drinks deeply (or merely takes a sip) from what she finds there.  The old knowledge and knowings are available to us all in the present because as the Druids know, so do we.

Thanks for visiting.  Return often.