Hives

When we were in Budapest, we visited Odon Lechner's Postal Savings Bank. It's decorated by (among other fanciful creatures), large beehives to which ants (see below) are crawling upwards.

The hive, we read, is a symbol of the sweetness that is achieved by saving, and hence its presence signals the building is a bank.

Then we started noticing hives on buildings in Timisoara, like this one on the Banca de Scont right off Piata Unirii.

And this one on what was originally the Iosefin Savings Bank.

This is on a building in Piata Stantul Gheorge.

This figure, though, we don't get. Hives as headress. She's on a large building in Fabric that has a big boat coming out of the pediment and that seems to be a collection of apartments. I would love to know what her iconography means. I also wish I knew how to "read" the other images I see so often on these Timisoara buildings --how many are fanciful and how many signal something about how the building was to be used or understood as a civic space.