Changes

}}</ref> Was this a reference to the Biblical "land flowing with milk and honey" or mockery made of the northern savages who, rather then feed on bread, wine and olive oil (like the civilized Mediterranean farmers do), make their living by hunting, gathering and herding? Hard to tell; perhaps it was a little bit of both. Anyway, my point is that it's difficult to imagine Polish cuisine without honey cakes and honey-flavoured gingerbread, honey-sweetened tea, mead and honey liqueurs, such as ''krupnik'' or ''kramambula''.

While looking for doing some information research about the importance of these insects for in the history of Poland, I once came across the following little story in an "encyclopedia" of sweets:

You can see at the first glance that it's one big pile of ribbishrubbish. It wasn't the heir to the throne that was (usually) elected in Poland, but a new king after the previous one had died or resigned. The process was called an "election", not "selection". And whatever one might say about the actual political power of Polish kings, it was still too important an office to leave the job or picking the right candidate to a bunch insects. Besides, no one in Poland has ever heard of King "Wiscionsky" or a diamond bee in any of the crowns known to have been kept in the royal treasury. Yet, someone thought the sotyr story was credible enough to put it in a book with the word "encyclopedia" in its title, so maybe there is a pollen grain of truth to it?

[[File:Rubens Władysław Vasa (detail).jpg|thumb|upright|Prince Vladislaus Sigismund Vasa, the future king of Poland King Vladislaus IV (r. reigned 1632–1648), as painted in 1624 by Peter Paul Rubens]]So what's the deal with the king elected by bees? Did any of the Polish monarchs have anything to do with these critters? Well, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' for example, in its 1911 edition, says that King Vladislaus IV, the ruler under whose reign Poland reached the peak of its power (which, if you think about it, means that the realm's decline started under his watch), was known the "king of bees". How So how did he earn this moniker?

| Wladislaus IV, who succeeded his father [Sigismund III] in 1632, was the most popular monarch who ever sat on the Polish throne. The szlachta[nobility], who had had a&nbsp;“King Log” in Sigismund, were determined that Wladislaus should be “a King Bee who will give us nothing but honey” – in other words they hoped to wheedle him out of even more than they had wrested from his predecessor. Wladislaus submitted to everything. He promised never to declare war or levy troops without the consent of the sejm, undertook to fill all vacancies within a&nbsp;certain time, and released the szlachta from the payment of income-tax, their one remaining fiscal obligation.

In fact, the nobles, or ''szlachta'', loved Vladislaus so much that his election was probably the calmest and shortest in the history of Polish monarchy – nobody else would even bother to run against everyone's favourite candidate. But the nobles loved those kings who gave them much and required little in return. The more inactive a king, the better. It turns out that the man who first compared the nobles' darling to a lazy drone was Paweł Piasecki, Bishop of Kamieniec, who criticized his majesty in these words:

| The king of Poland is in all his public functions like a king of bees, who only brings his subjects honey. {{...}} He has no sting whatsoever, as the lives, personal freedoms and property of the nobility are are completely entirely outside the scope of his power.

It's true that drones, or male bees, have no stings; but they don't produce honey either, so I'm not sure about the accuracy of this simile. But are we sure that Vladislaus IV is the same as the king in the election-by-bees story? Not really; neither the surname nor the first name nor the surname check out. And even though Poland has never had a king by the name "Wiscionsky", it did have one whose first name was Michael.

}}</ref> and it's better than the one cited before in that at least it cites the source. And the source turns out to be a German-language ''History of Beekeeping'' by Johann Georg Bessler from the late 19th century. Here's what it says he wrote on the topic:

| Michael Wyscionsky [sic] received the Polish royal crown from the people, because during the royal election a swarm of bees sat on him.

| źródło = ''Ibid.'', [http://digital.zbmed.de/apidologie/content/pageview/2361983 sp. 218], own translation

[[File:King Michael Korybut Wisniowiecki.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki, King of Poland (r. reigned 1669–1673)]]So, as you may have guessed by now, "Michael Wiscionsky's" actual name was Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki (pronounced ''kaw-{{small|RIH}}-boot veesh-nyaw-{{small|VYET}}-skee''). His election to the Polish throne 350 years ago was quite a surprise to pretty much everyone – not least to Prince Michael himself. His father, Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, Palatine of Ruthenia, owned vast swaths of land in Ukraine and became a national hero by ruthlessly quelling a Cossack rebellion, but Michael had inherited neither his father's leadership skills nor his wealth. He wasn't even considered a candidate right up to the point when he got elected.