History of The Medina Bee

No matter who you are, if you’ve been to Medina, you've seen the Medina Bee. This iconic mascot has been a staple of school pride for almost a century. But why a Bee, and who created the mascot? We were determined to answer this question, and after days of sifting through yearbooks, Medinamites, and articles, we found a mixed answer. Some may know that the medina bee comes from the Root Candles Company. Amos Root, the company's founder, was an innovator in beekeeping. To honor his legacy, the school mascot was created.

When starting the search, We thought it would be as simple as putting the logo through a reverse image search, but that gave us no luck. We began searching through old Medinamite articles until we found this comic strip from a 1976 Medinamite, showing a crude drawing of what looks like the modern medina bee - named Buzzy. We could not find any credits for this strip or the Medina Bee logo. This comic strip and this 1971 yearbook cover imply that the current logo was created in early 1971, but as much as we scoured, we could not find any proof of this. 

After searching several years of Medinamite articles, we found what may be the first instance of the Medina bee mascot in the header of a 1964 article. As far as we can tell, this is the very first use of a discint bee mascot for Medina. While the drawing itself has no credit, all of the original art in the Medinamite that year was credited to Deb Zarney, who was a freshman at MHS at the time. 

While 1964 has the first distinct mascot, the first time that a bee has been used for Medina was in 1936. This year's yearbook was themed around bees and beekeeping. We are unsure as to why this theme was used, and not revisited for another 20 or so years, but nonetheless, this is the first use of Medina bees. The first instance of the football team being called the Medina Bees was in 1938, so this yearbook predates even that.  Separate from the bee mascot, we started to see instances of a bear mascot named Buzzy being used in the early 1950s. It's unclear why this bear mascot existed when the Medina Bees was an established name for the football team, and it becomes especially confusing when the bear has the same name as the bee mascot.

At the end of our research, we sadly could not find who created the modern medina bee, and we came back with more questions than answers. However, we found the lineage of previous ideas and mascots that came before it and shaped the mascot that we have today. If you have any information that we may have missed, be sure to write to the Medinamite and let us know.