Bugonia stands as one of antiquity’s most enduring symbols of death and renewal. Greek for “oxen-born,” bugonia describes a phenomenon once believed by people across continents and centuries: that bees could spontaneously arise from the decaying flesh of a sacrificed bull.
The most famous account of bugonia appears in Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil, published around 29 B.C. In Virgil’s story, the shepherd Aristaeus loses his bees to disease and hunger. When he beseeches his mother, the nymph Cyrene, for help, she instructs him to perform a ritual in which he sacrifices a bull and seals its carcass in a dark enclosure. Days later, a swarm emerges from the ox’s rotting body, renewing his hives.
What are the origins of bugonia?
It's unclear where and when this idea exactly arose, though both Virgil and the third-century B.C. writer Antigonus of Carystus claim bugonia was a technique used by Egyptian farmers. Versions of the myth appear throughout the Mediterranean world, from Herodotus to Hellenistic poets like Callimachus and Theocritus. Similarly, the Bible's Book of Judges includes Samson’s riddle of honey in a lion’s carcass, which echoes this theme.
Some scholars suspect the belief may be a case of mistaken identity—drone flies, insects with gold and black bodies, resemble bees and breed in animal carcasses.
The Trick to Stone Age Yogurt? Ants
Neolithic people were making and eating yogurt—or something like it—at least 8,000 years ago.
Neolithic people were making and eating yogurt—or something like it—at least 8,000 years ago.
When did people stop believing in bugonia?
Though ancient writers sometimes treated bugonia as practical knowledge, other philosophers omitted it from their writing about the natural world. Aristotle, who believed in spontaneous generation (that life can arise from nonliving matter), dismisses the idea in Generation of Animals.
Some scholars suggest bugonia was viewed as a thaumasion—a wondrous or miraculous event—rather than fact.
Still, belief in bugonia lasted centuries. In Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedic work The Natural History, written in the first century, the Roman naturalist treats bugonia as a factual agricultural process. And the Byzantine Geoponica, a 10th-century compendium of agricultural knowledge, preserved the ritual’s steps in detail, referencing works dating back to the third century.
The bugonia myth persisted until at least the 17th century, when Italian scientist Francesco Redi published Experiments on the Generation of Insects (1688). Through simple tests, he showed that putrefying meat only produces maggots when exposed to flies, putting the first nail in the coffin of spontaneous generation—and by extension, bugonia.
