Now We Are Thriai (With Apologies to A A Milne)

In the Hymn to Hermes, there are matters which Apollo cannot share, not even with his new BFF, and the light-fingered nature of his new best friend forces him to be explicit. Hermes is the crosser of boundaries, whose transgressions are not transgressions. Apollo explains that he swore to Zeus that he alone of the other Olympian gods would have access to the will of the Fates via the birds, but offers Hermes a consolation prize in the form of a humbler oracular tradition. Ancient zoologists are notoriously unobservant, but even they agree that bees are not birds despite the ability to fly. Bees and honey appear frequently in the Greek mythological tradition, as animals, as a foodstuff, and as a generic name for doomed young royals such as the unfortunate Princess of Corinth or the original name of Bellerophon. Bees, like birds, form patterns which humans, inveterate pattern-seekers, can interpret as insight against future insecurity. Divination by bee will not incur the wrath of Zeus, because Zeus does not care. This may seem a strange attitude to prognostication from the same god who swore Apollo to eternal secrecy, but perhaps the matters revealed by apiomancy are deemed petty and not worthy of condescension. Hermes' governance of this lesser oracular tradition may be a concession to an older, humbler practice available to those who cannot afford a trip to Delphi, on the same level as plucking flowers in a game of 'she loves me, she loves me not'; but the accuracy of prophecy, whether apiary or avian, is known only to the capricious gods into whose remit it falls. You're definitely not getting your money back.