Centuries before Butler's Feminine Monarchie, ideas about bee sex played an important role in the invention of human genders. Christian monks in the central Middle Ages (800–1070) interacted with bees on a daily basis, because they relied on them as a source of honey and wax. Bee charms provide a valuable document of relations between bees and monks. These are rituals monks performed when the hive moved from one skep to another, attempting to ensure that the bees would settle in the skep the monks intended for them, and not fly off into the wilderness or to a skep belonging to other humans. Old English and Latin bee charms from this period show that monks had complex emotional relationships with bees: there is a mixture of superiority and submission to the bees, and the monks' ideas about bee sex play a role in this emotional drama.
Depending on what they read, people in medieval Europe believed that bees had no sex, or that they were all female, or that female bees were the default and male drones were a deficient version of female bees. At the same time, bees were frequently cited as an example of virtuous communal life, of chastity (since they were believed to reproduce asexually), and of poetic inspiration (bees made honey from the pollen of different flowers, just as poets composed verse from by drawing inspiration from different sources). All these factors made bees an appealing role model for monks, who were driven by ideals of chaste communal living that placed them outside the roles of 'man' and 'woman' as determined by marriage. Using bees' connection to poetry, monastic writers identified themselves with bees to form a distinct 'nonbeenary gender', drawing on their contact with bees to make sense of their own role in their society. These experiments in gender can be found in works of monastic literature including letters, sermons, and poems about the lives of saints.