Part of the traditional meaning to beeswax candles:
“The pure wax extracted by bees from flowers symbolizes the pure flesh of Christ received from His Virgin Mother, the wick signifies the soul of Christ, and the flame represents His divinity.”
- The Catholic Encyclopedia
There’s a great deal of spiritual symbolism behind bees:
‘Look at the bees upon the thyme; they find therein a bitter juice, but in sucking it they convert it into honey. because this is their special power. O worldling! devout souls find much bitterness, it is true, in their exercises of mortification, but in performing them they convert them into sweetness and joy. Fire, flames, wheels, swords, were as flowers and perfumes to the martyrs, because they were truly devout. If devotion can sweeten the most cruel tortures, and even death itself, what will it not do for acts of true virtue ? Sugar sweetens unripe fruit, and corrects whatever is harsh or hurtful in that which is quite ripe. Now, devotion is the true spiritual sugar which takes from mortifications their bitterness, and all danger from consolations; it cheers the poor and restrains the rich, it mitigates the misery of the oppressed and the insolence of favourites, the sadness of those in solitude and the dissensions of those who live together. It is like the fire in winter and the dew in summer. It knows how to abound and how to want, it makes honour and contempt equally useful; it bears, with even mind, pleasure as well as pain, and fills us with a wonderful sweetness.’
St. Francis de Sales
‘All Christians, certainly, but especially all religious, in considering and reading the lives of the saints, should try and form themselves upon their example, just as the bees only light upon the flowers in order to gather honey where with to nourish themselves.’
St. Francis de Sales
‘Meditation is made, we may say, as the bees make honey ; for they make it by gathering the dew that falls from heaven upon the flowers, and drawing a little juice from these flowers, which they change into honey, and then carry to their hives. Thus we go over and over the life of our Lord in meditation, taking up one action after another, and considering them, in order to compose the honey of holy virtues, and draw from them the graces of a holy meditation.’
St. Francis de Sales,
‘Mystical Flora’
