In ancient Egypt the bee was an insignia of kingship associated particularly with Lower Egypt, where there may even have been a Bee King in pre-dynastic times.[1]
Honey bees, signifying immortality and resurrection, were royal emblems of the Merovingians, revived by Napoleon.[2]
A community of honey bees has often been employed by political theorists as a model of human society. This metaphor occurs in Aristotle[3] and Plato;[4] in Virgil[5] and Seneca;[6] in Erasmus[7] and Shakespeare[8] and in Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices made Public Benefits, which influenced the economists Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes among others.[9] Tolstoy similarly compares human society to a community of bees in War and Peace.[10] Jean-Baptiste Simon titled his work of apiculture Le gouvernement admirable, ou, la république des abeilles (Paris, 1740).