As I’ve previously noted, Annys and I have produced a menu scroll for each of Alesone’s feasts thus far, and although it came down to the wire, we managed to pull off making one for Mudthaw.

Alesone requested a bee and/or beekeeper theme, since this feast is a celebration of the thawing of the mud and traditonally happens at the end of March. With that in mind, I researched period examples of beekeeper imagery. I wasn’t disappointed: I came across a drawing by Pieter Breugel the Elder called “The Beekepers and the Birdnester“, which, while a derisive allegory aimed at the Catholic Church, features a representation of the totally spooky costume of beekeepers at the end of the 16th century. Mainly, that’s a long, heavy linen tunic with a hood, into which is sewn the bottom of a basket as a mask.

Annys had found a book of hours which she liked, the Waddesdon Manor Book of Hours MS26, fol. 3v (1540), and since this menu was a smaller peice than we’ve done for the previous feasts, she thought the book of hours size would be appropriate. The image pages feature a frame for the text, and a medallion representing the season or a zodiac symbol for the month. I based the frame and medallion this example, replacing the zodiac symbol with a study of a bee. Annys used a hand somewhere between a gothic and a gothic batarde.

After the beekeeper nightmares receded, I went after period representations of bees. This proved disappointing, since most of the examples we found resembled a 2nd grader’s grasp of insect life. I eventually found a sample I could base my rendition on. As disappointing as the images were, our search did yield a translation of a passage speaking about bees, from which we learned:

• bees are the smallest of birds
• they form from the bodies of dead oxen (first there are worms, then there are bees)
• they live communally
• they select the noblest among them to be King
• they fight wars with other hives
• they make honey

I find that bit of knowledge priceless, and definitely worth the time we put into the bee research. 🙂

(Process info after the jump.)

Below is a look at the scroll partially completed, showing my rubric pencilling and much of the inking. I apologise, but I was so gung-ho to work on this that I quite failed to scan the finished pencils, instead diving right in to start the inking. I learned that the ink I used (the ink that was in the pen I chose to use) is to avoided in the future… it came up off the perg when I erased the rubrics (this can be seen slightly on the left-most beekeeper, despite my cleanup on the scan.) I’m not sure that the other extrme is better – Annys used Windsor & Newton inks for the text and found that she needed to completely clean the nib every three words or so. I’m not sure I would want that issue to pop up while drawing, but at least the ink would hold up to an eraser. I’ve also included some details.