Aristaeus (/ærɪˈstiːəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἀρισταῖος Aristaios) was the mythological culture hero credited with the discovery of many rural useful arts and handicrafts, including bee-keeping;[1] he was the son of the huntress Cyrene and Apollo.

Aristaeus ("the best") was a cult title in many places: Boeotia, Arcadia, Ceos, Sicily, Sardinia, Thessaly, and Macedonia; consequently a set of "travels" was imposed, connecting his epiphanies in order to account for these widespread manifestations.

If Aristaeus was a minor figure at Athens, he was more prominent in Boeotia, where he was "the pastoral Apollo",[2] and was linked to the founding myth of Thebes by marriage with Autonoë, daughter of Cadmus, the founder.

"Aristaios" ("the best") is an epithet rather than a name:For some men to call Zeus and holy Apollo.Agreus and Nomios,[7] and for others Aristaios (Pindar)Thanks to a vast family tree and connections, Aristaeus is a god and patron god and protector of a wide array of rustic and rural arts, crafts, skills, practices and traditions (handicrafts)—often associated with smallholdings—some of which is overlapped with his many relatives: When he was grown, he sailed from Libya to Boeotia, where he was inducted into further mysteries in the cave of Chiron the centaur.

In Boeotia, he was married to Autonoë and became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, who inherited the family passion for hunting, to his ruin,[10] and of Macris, who nursed the child Dionysus.

In a development that offered more immediate causality for the myth, Aristaeus discerned that the Ceans' troubles arose from murderers hiding in their midst, the killers of Icarius in fact.