A thread of medieval bees with a miracle rather than a sting in its tail

What noise do early English bees make, before they start to BUZZ around 1500?

They BOM, BUM or BOMEL: ‘the BOMELYNG of the bees’ is, as one 15thC poet names it, their song, their language

Chaucer is fascinated by noisy bees and noisily apian people

A swarm of bees is the climax of a catalogue of uproar in the NPT when the fox takes Chauntecleer

The crowd that ‘swarmeth’ around the amazing horse of brass in the SqT ‘murmured as dooth a swarm of been [bees]’

The noisy crowd who arrive to petition in the House of Fame are also like swarming bees, making ‘such a maner murmurynge’

(MURMURING in Middle English is a louder sound than today’s word would suggest)

Scottish bees are equally noisy. Douglas’s Virgilian bees in their beehive make ‘mekill dyn and BEMYNG’ [i.e. noise and BOOMING]

Bees also MUM, HUM and HUMBLE. John Burrell describes bees ‘mumming and bumming' in 1590

Though small, ‘Al hugely and haske [loudly] yf [when] that they [bees] humme, / As houses holgh [hollow] their voices multiplye’ says the 15thC translator of Palladius’s De re rustica

In 1582, Stanyhurst’s Virgilian bees ‘toyle [toil] with mutterus [i.e. mutter-ous] humbling’

Bees are thus HUMBLEBEES (first recorded in the 15thC) before they are BUMBLEBEES (first recorded in 1530)

And now the promised story. What would happen if you put a piece of consecrated wafer in a beehive?

Well, the bees would miraculously build a miniature church, of course, as this story from the 15thC translation of the Alphabet of Tales recounts