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But the bees' culinary role doesn't stop at their sweet secretion. Poland is one of the world's largest major producers of temperate-zone fruits largely thanks to these little fluffy tireless workers in black-and-yellow stripes that tirelessly pollinate all those Polish apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach and apricot trees, not to mention berries, buckwheat, cucumbers and canola.<ref>{{Cyt

You can see at the first glance that it's one big pile of rubbish. 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 of 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 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?

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 as the "king of bees". So how did he earn this moniker?

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

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, Prince 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 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.

[[File:PL Gloger-Encyklopedja staropolska ilustrowana T.2 133-1.jpg|thumb|upright|Ground plan of the royal election field. The Senate, made up of bishops, ministers, palatines and castellans, convened in a special shed (''szopa''), while elected representatives of the nobility congregated inside a rectangular ditch known as the "Circle of Knights" (''koło rycerskie''). Other nobles remained outside, grouped by palatinates (provinces).]]

Where two are fighting, the third wins, as a Polish proverb goes. Eventually, the nobility got tired of endless bickering among the senators and decided to take up the idea advocated by Crown Underchancellor Andrzej Olszowski to elect a so-called "Piast". House Piast was Poland's first royal dynasty, back when the throne was still hereditary and not elective, but the idea was not to elect someone with actual Piast roots in his family tree (if this had been the case, then Charles Leopold would have stood a better chance, thanks to Cymburgis of Masovia, a Piast duchess who was his great⁸-grandmother in two different lines; besides, the last actual Piast duke, George William of Brieg, was actually still alive). The idea was simply to elect a native Pole rather than any of the foreign princes. The only question was , who specifically was to become this "Piast" king?

And this is when, according to the legend, a swarm of honey bees arrived in the election field and sat on the Polish-born Prince Michael and the nobles concluded that if the bees had already made their pick, then then rest was just formality. All the senators could do was to agree with the choice made by the insects bugs and the nobility, and thus a completely astonished Michael was proclaimed king.

It wasn't just Michael, though, who was totally taken by surprise. The senators and many of the nobles were shocked as well. No wonder his unexpected election was soon being explained away with divine intervention by means of insects and birds (other legends talk of a dove perched atop the Senatorial Shed and an eagle soaring above the Circle of Knights). Interestingly, I've been able to find two eyewitness accounts which actually confirm the presence of a bee swarm in the election field. In details, though, not only do they contradict the legend; they also contradict each otherone another. Let's start with the point of view of Wespazjan Kochowski:

But that would mean that the bees did not pick any specific candidate; they just flew into the field, sat down to rest for a while and then flew away. And it was already after Michael had been elected, so all the bees could do was, at best, to approve the choice made by the nobility. You can see exactly this interpretation of the event in an anonymous poem cited by Kochowski:

| I spent the entire following day, the eve of the election, meeting with senators. I talked with the chaplain to Grand Crown Marshal John Sobieski, who told me that his master hadn't written down the treaty yet, but he would trust my word. The real reason for the delay was that Lady Sobieska had forgotten to include her brother, Lord d'Arquien, in the treaty, and as the date of the election would fall on the feast of Corpus Christi, she wanted to postpone it by one day, so that she would have more time to haggle something out for her brother. The Palatine of Podolia [Aleksander Stanisław Bełżecki], whom she had enlisted into her service, could think of no other way to delay the election than to propose a Piast, that is, a native-born king. He imagined that the Crowners would never agree to a king from Lithuania, nor would the Lithuanians ever vote for a Crowner king [the Crown and Lithuania were the two constituent nations of the Polish Commonwealth]; that it would cause mayhem and put off the election, giving Sobieski's wife the time to make me accept her conditions. Confident of this scheme, he left her and went to [meet the nobles of] his palatinate, whom he told that on his way he had been harassed by swarms of bees, which led him here, and that it surely meant that a Piast should be elected king, as these were the bees from Piast's own apiary.

As you can see, this was a very clever plot, but it didn't quite work out. All because of possibly the biggest greatest miracle in Polish history – the Poles immediately agreed agreeing to elect a single common candidate, no other that than Prince Michael Wiśniowiecki. It's quite telling that, apart from this one incredible miracle, there is nothing supernatural in either of these accounts. A swarm of bees had come and gone, and it was up to the politicians to assign a symbolic meaning of their choice to a simple natural occurrence. Kochowski is actually quite straightforward about it:

| Wasn't it due to blind fate rather than a miracle that the bees appeared on a beautiful spring day? Whether their numbers had grown and could no longer fit inside their hives, so that entire swarms went looking for new settlements, or they simply left the nest to gather honey in nearby fields, one can presume that only chance led them within the Circle, where they relaxed rested before flying on.

| There lived at that time in Krushvitsa a townsman named Piast, son of Koshichko, a honey hunter (or a wheelwright, according to some), a good, simple and just man. His wife, Repicha, had just given him a son, so he killed a hog and fermented a barrel of mead for a pagan name-giving naming ceremony. {{...}} There was at that time a great crowd in Krushvitsa and there was a shortage of food, so they went to Piast to buy some, but he would give away for free the pork and the mead he had prepared for the name-giving naming to anyone who came; and he had so much that they were all unable to drink all of the mead and or eat all of the meat.

"Piast the Wheelwright" would eventually prevail over "Piast the Honey Hunter"in popular imagination, but during the royal election on of 1669, the reference to Piast's apiary wouldn't have risen an eyebrow (even though an apiary is not the same thing as a wild -bee nest). A misconception that is still quite alive, though, is that ancient Slavs drank mead, or honey wine, on an everyday basis. In fact, mead has always been a luxury beverage, available only to the affluent and reserved for special occasionoccasions. It was beer, as in the original Piast story, that was the everyday thirst-quencher of the common folk.

Two years after losing the Polish royal election, the Grand Condé suffered an even greater loss – his court chef, the famous François Vatel, committed suicide. It was on the third day of a great banquet, which Condé was giving, with Vatel's hands, to King Louis XIV at the castle of Chantilly. It was a Friday, a lean day, and the transport of fish was running late; for Vatel , who was responsible for managing the whole operation, it was a dishonour which only falling on his sword (three times!) could wash away.

Who knows, maybe if Condé had become king of Poland, then Vatel would have lived longer? Maybe he would have made his career at the Polish royal court and the invention he is traditionally credited for – sweetened whipped cream – would have been known as ''crème Varsovie'' rather than ''crème Chantilly''? Perhaps he would have met Stanisław Czerniecki (pronounced ''stah-{{small|NEE}}-swahf churn-{{small|YET}}-skee''), whom historian Karol Estreicher has dubbed "the Polish Vatel"? Czerniecki, author of the first cookbook printed in Polish, had served Prince Michael Wiśniowiecki for some time, before getting a job as the head chef to the Princes Lubomirski. The political rivalry between the Grand Condé and Prince Michael is one thing, but image imagine how much more fascinating a culinary duel between Vatel and Czerniecki would have been!

History took a different course, though. It was Michael who got the job as king of Poland, but not for long. He happened to be one of those Polish monarchs who loved to eat and drink well (and in copious amounts). Kochowski wrote that Michael was "unrestrained in his consumption, {{...}} he drunk much more beer than wine, with salt, sugar and ginger."<ref>{{Cyt

}}, own translation</ref> No wonder the king died from peptic ulcers at the age of 33 from peptic ulcers.<ref>{{Cyt

But are there any Polish sources that mention the insect-shaped crown element? Not many, but here's an excerpt from an article sent in from an anonymous "apiarist from the Eastern Borderlands" to the interwar magazine ''Polish Beekeeper''. It mention mentions both Piast the Wheelwright-''cum''-Beekeeper and the diamond bee:

Now, that's a pretty good lead! Joachim Lelewel(pronounced ''leh-{{small|LEH}}-vehl''), a respectable 19th-century historian, did, in fact, author a book entitled ''Bees and Honey Hunting''. So let's see what exactly he wrote there about the diamond bee:

What Lelewel focused on were taxes and fines historically paid in honey and wax, as well as the history of Polish apiculture-related legislation. Which is, arguably, a rather big deal, as even today, an act of law as important as the Polish Civil Code contains a separate article about chasing a runaway bee swarm.<ref>[httphttps://prawosupertrans2014.sejmfiles.govwordpress.plcom/2014/isap.nsf06/DocDetailsthe-civil-code.xsp?id=WDU19640160093 pdf Ustawa z&nbsp;dnia 23 kwietnia 1964&nbsp;r. – Kodeks cywilny,] Dz.U. 1964 nr 16 poz. 93, art. 182</ref> But not Lelewel didn't write a single word about any bee-shaped jewels. Why, then, did the Borderland anonymous beekeeper cite reference Lelewel when writing about the diamond bee? For this, I believe, we've got to go back to Bessler again. In Bessler's book, the story of a royal election settled by bees and the bee-shaped jewel in the crown if is followed by a list of Polish apicultural literature. And the first work on that list is no other than Lelewel's book! My hunch is that the anonymous Borderland beekeeper found the information about the diamond bee in Bessler's book and thought (wrongly) that it was taken from the first source listed in the bibliography. Only, this means that we've made a full circle and we still don't know where the hell Bessler got that diamond bee from.

While looking for any other references to a diamond bee, I found something slightly different – a bee on the diamond bee dress of Our Lady of Częstochowa (pronounced ''chen-staw-{{small|HAW}}-vah''). Also known as the Black Madonna , Our Lady of Częstochowa, it is Poland's most sacred Catholic icon. For centuries it has been decorated with so-called "dresses", or specially-cut metal screens covered with bejeweled cloth. The two oldest of such screens that have been preserved to our times are known as the ruby and the diamond dresses. The jewels that are sewn onto them are votive offerings gathered over the centuries at the Pauline monastery of Częstochowa, where the painting is kept. Many of these jewels are actually quite secular personal accessories that had been worn by kings, queens and aristocrats before they donated them to the Black Madonna. They come in many different shapes and sizes, including a few butterflies and one honey bee.

}}</ref> Before it was given to the monastery, could it have bedecked a royal crown? Unlikely. Could it grace some other part of royal vestments? More likely. Many of the ornaments found on Our Lady's dresses are known to come from kingly gifts. No one seems to know for sure, but perhaps the emerald-and-pearl bee was an offering made by on one of Polish kings or queens?

If you'd like to give it a closer look, then you've got a unique occasion to do it only until 4 August. For the first time in history, the diamond dress has left the confines of the monastery and you can admire it at the [https://www.zamek-krolewski.pl/en/your-visit/temporary-exhibitions/Jewels "To Rule And To Dazzle"] exhibition at the Royal Castle of Warsaw.