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Show a prominent symbol for political organization and power. In European folklife bees and their hive were treated with reverence. Beekeepers used charms to keep bees from leaving the hives. Wooden hives were painted with religious scenes in historic Austria. Hives were decorated with ribbons at celebrations. Deaths in the family were announced to the bees as a first order of business. Folklore maintained that bees sang to honor Christ on Christmas Eve, and that bees renounced the pleasures of love out of respect to God. Beehives in the Americas Ancient Americans in the tropics of South and Central America cultivated wild honey from the stingless bee, which still flies undomesti-cated in those climes. When Spanish explorers visited Mayan temples they found a flourishing bee industry and accompanying lore. In North America, however, there are no records of an indigenous honey bee. The old world honey bee was shipped to Cuba in the seventeenth century where before long beehives appeared in every community of new world settlement. Both beekeeping and bee mythology paralleled the old world inheritance during the colonial period. The hive as a symbol declined in the nineteenth century. The gradual replacement of honey with sugar and the replacement of honey-based alcohol with other intoxicants helped to lessen the bee's practical importance. Beekeeping drastically changed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as the old-style skep hive was gradually replaced by the new movable frame boxes, breaking the link between utility and myth. The scientific approach to beekeeping has ended the use of the skep in America. Science has also meticulously observed the subtleties of the bees' life, so that the bee no longer seems a mysterious and pure animal sent to earth from heaven above. Although we still admire the bee's industry and enjoy its honey and wax, the bee has lost its status as a sacred animal. Mormons, Masons, and the Beehive One hundred and fifty years ago Joseph Smith, a young man from upstate New York, established a religion called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church began with a small group of neighbors and family who were persuaded that Joseph Smith had received a vision which instructed him to reestablish the true church of Christ. The young prophet was told by an angel to dig up plates of gold on which appeared hieroglyphs. Through divine guidance he translated these plates into a volume called the Book of Mormon, which unfolded the history of the Americas. This new scripture along with the Bible formed the basis for the new religion, established at a time in American history of great religious revival. Like the writers of the Constitution, Joseph Smith and other key men in the new religion were Masons. During the early formulative period the Church found needed organization, ritual, and symbol in Grand Masonry. This adaptation was justified by the Mormons' conviction that much of the Masonic Order had survived in correct form from the true gospel of Christ. Though the fledgling church conformed to a degree with the norms of nineteenth-century American life, its members were unusually |