Please note: This necklace is Ready to Ship and will leave the studio in 3 - 5 business days. The chain is 30 inches in length. If you would like a different chain length you must email us with your desired length immediately after placing your order. 

If you purchase this item with any other jewel, please be aware that our jewelry is handmade to order and takes approximately 6-8 weeks to create before shipping, meaning your Ready to Ship jewel will ship with the rest of your order. This cuts down on multiple shipping costs for you, and unnecessary waste for the environment.  

Once upon a time, I visited The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles at the urging of artist Caitlin McCormack. She was carrying an interesting tote bag at a group dinner one night back in 2015 and told me, in my memory at least, in a similar way I tell people about Sleep No More, to go see the museum if I had the chance, without telling me much about it. 

The museum is strange and small, darker than perhaps it should be, but I love this about it; it lives in  an unexpected place; you’d walk right by it if you didn’t know it was there. That places like this still exist fills me with a particular felt sense of awe and wonder I’m always chasing. If you have the opportunity, I hope you go.

Inside the museum is an exhibition on folkloric beliefs that have passed into superstition, but at the time they were practiced, were held as common knowledge. Within a glass vitrine, a bee hive of sorts was held in silence, and a card describing the practice of ‘Telling the Bees’ was nearby, which sparked  my obsession with the practice of telling the bees and inspired this jewel.

To ‘Tell the Bees’ is perhaps an ancient practice, traced as far back as Hellenistic Greece or even earlier. Hives and bees were an important part of life as honey and beeswax were valuable goods - beeswax provided a clean burning material for candles to bring light into small dark places - an apt metaphor for lighting the way in dark times and dark spaces. The oracle site at Delphi was said to have been created by bees; even the Pythia were called ‘Delphic Bees’ and their trance-like states were linked to the consumption of honey. 

The practice of Telling the Bees, involved all major life events, keeping them included as one would with any other close family member. They were told of marriages, births, & perhaps most well known, deaths. The  hives were “heaved up” at the same time the coffin was, and they were also decorated with funerary crepes. Cakes were also fed to the bees after funerals and weddings. It was believed that if a hive was not told of these life events, they would leave the hive, or die.

Here, we offer a “ souvenir pressed penny” coin, featuring a bell jar shaped beehive, surrounded by blooming, eternal roses & other flora to whisper your own secrets, anxieties, fears, hopes, dreams and anything else you wish into. The hive is highly tactile, while the back is kept intentionally smooth like a worry stone, making this piece ideal for use in meditation or in other moments when you need to feel something tactile to ground yourself.

Additionally, this coin represents a talisman for sweetening or the illumination of a difficult time in one's life, as Charon’s Obol, the coin pressed into the mouth of those who died to ‘pay’ the ferryman for passage over the river Styx to the Underworld, was sometimes struck with a bee to represent a ‘sweet’ afterlife.

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Details:

- 30 mm at it's widest 

- 60 mm from top to bottom ( including jump ring )

- Shown on Miguel with a 20 inch chain

- Shown on Jess with a 16 inch chain 

- Pendant, chain, jump rings, and clasp are all solid Sterling Silver hand oxidized to achieve our favorite shade of stormy gray and then highlighted to reveal the bright luminous silver beneath

***IMPORTANT***             

Visit the Policy Page to make an educated and informed purchase HERE.

If you have further questions, we are always here to serve you in a kind and timely manner: via bloodmilkjewels@gmail.com