Few historical figures are more glamorized than Cleopatra. The story of the fabled pharaoh was immortalized by the 1963 titular biopic, a gilded epic featuring the seductive Elizabeth Taylor with kohl-rimmed eyes and elaborate costumes. Cleopatra’s age-gap relationship with Julius Caesar has also been well-documented and dramatized on-screen, but online rumors focus on another, more salacious detail of her sex life: the usage of a proto-vibrator, powered by bees.

If you think this is too wild to be true, you’re right. Historians have spent centuries dissecting the life and legacy of Cleopatra, debating everything from her beauty to her ethnicity. Unsurprisingly, her masturbation habits have also been put under a microscope.

Depending on who you ask, the enterprising queen apparently filled either a papyrus box or a hollow gourd with live bees. The frenzied buzzing of these ill-fated bees caused an intense vibration, which created a sort of makeshift vibrator that Cleopatra then pressed against her genitals. It would be a genius — if not exactly humane — invention if true, but it definitely isn’t.

Intrepid sleuths have written online blogs debunking the myths around Cleopatra’s sex life, citing many inconsistencies in the accounts of her pollen-powered sex toys. But this bee-powered vibrator claim is most likely a result of how Cleopatra has been portrayed over the centuries. According to popular memory — and to Reddit — Cleopatra had an insatiable sexual appetite. Some historians even claim she was a raging nympho who once visited a brothel and slept with 106 men in a single night.

It’s also worth noting that histories of vibrators have been increasingly scrutinized for factual inaccuracies. Did doctors really get off women to rid them of hysteria? Maybe, but probably not. There was, however, a well-documented boom in vibrating massage wands — those chunky, Hitachi-style heavyweights — advertised to housewives in the early 1900s as a form of stress relief, a beauty tool guaranteed to make every woman look her best. What we don’t know for sure is whether they were being innocently used as neck and back massagers. We can speculate that curious women of the time experimented with nestling these unwieldy wands between their legs, but historical records of personal sex lives aren’t exactly easy to find.

That said, erotic curiosity is as old as time itself — you only have to look at cave paintings of the ancient world to see that carnal desire is nothing new. There are ancient dildos aplenty in the archives of art museums, and vibrators before electricity definitely existed. In fact, there’s documented evidence of the frankly terrifying Manipulator, a Victorian era hand-crank vibrator powered by a steam engine, as well as other innovative sex toys preserved by San Francisco’s Antique Vibrator Museum and other similar museums.

As for Cleopatra, she could have had a wildly inventive sex life. But in a wider context, histories have long been written and shaped by powerful men, and men have had a historical tendency to smear women they don’t like. In Seduction and Power: Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts, Francisco Pina Polo offers an in-depth history of Cleopatra’s sexualization throughout centuries of art, including popular renditions of her dying by suicide with her hands clasped over her breasts. Polo writes about her rivalry with Augustus, the first Roman emperor, whose hatred of Cleopatra led to her best-known depictions as an “immoral, cruel, seductive and manipulating woman” and the “whore of oriental kings.” Historians have equated this to a long-standing smear campaign against Cleopatra, aided by the destruction of primary sources in the library of Alexandria.

This context means that the more clickbait-worthy retellings of Cleopatra’s sex life should be taken with a massive grain of salt. More than almost any other woman in history, her beauty and seductive wiles have been exaggerated, cemented as lore by the Hollywood machine. This then created an air of seductive mystique that lent itself nicely to the idea of a woman so horny that she pleasured herself with hollowed-out vegetables filled with live insects.