For centuries, humans have collected honey and put it to various uses, from a sweetener making alcohol
Dew distilled from stars and rainbows
IN ANTIQUITY, honey was considered a miracle of nature.
agle called it "dew distilled from stars and rainbows". And
Oblical idea of the Promised Land was a place where milk
I boney flowed in abundance.
Apiculture - beekeeping in common parlance - has
a widespread for ages. Honeycombs were kept all over the
A& in large cities and villages, on farms and rangelands, in
ws and deserts. Honeybees (Apis species) managed to col
&c sweet, dark, gold-coloured viscous liquid produced by
bus ftom the nectar of flowers. Neolithic people farmed
L making beelyeping one of the world's oldest forms of
MW husbandry.
1rk practice continues, though in a much more sophisti
W manner. The world's honey production in 1992 was
J&966 metric tonnes, according to the Food and
kahural Organization. North America produced 209,512
om Asia 331,566, Africa 112,189 and Europe 173,694 tonnes.
Honey was the sole sweetener for most societies till about
rs ago. These societies didn't have sugar, and honey
the sweetener and was often mixed with fruits, nuts,
id spices. The exceptions were India, China and North
a (which had maple syrup). The byproducts of bee-
were also used: wax to make candles and adhesives,
xn from the stings of honeybees as medicine. Besides,
warriors dumped entire beehives on enemies to break
their formations. The ancient Egyptians
used it for embalming. Alexander the
Great's body was taken back to Greece for
burial in a golden coffin filled with honey.
Honey is stored in the beehive in honeycombs, which are double layers of uniform
hexagonal cells constructed of beeswax, a
secretion of the worker bees, and propolis
- a plant resin. These are used in winter as
food for the bee larvae and other members
of the colony. Honey is an acidic mixture of
sucrose, glucose, fructose and water that is
often used to treat burns and lacerations
because of
its antiseptic properties. Its sugar
content and high viscosity checks the spread
of microorganisms; it is widely used as a
preservative; and it is a source of alcohol.
Mead, or'metheglin, an alcoholic beverage
fermented- from honey diluted with water,
was a very popular drink ampng the ancients in Scandinavia,
Gaul, Teutonic Europe and Greece.
By the 14th century, however, spiced ale and pyment
sweetened wine similar to mulsum) had superseded mead. In
England, it lost ground to ales and beers since the earliest days
of improved medieval agriculture. And when sugar began to
be imported in bulk from the West Indies, there was less
incentive to keep bees and honey became scarcer. Today,
mead is made as a sweet or dry wine of low alcoholic strength.
Collecting honey became easier with the advent of beekeeping. The earliest evidence of this comes from ancient
Egyptian tomb and temple drawings circa 2400 Bc. The hives
designed by the Egyptians were cylinders of unbaked hardened
mud, with a capacity of about 8 litres, with a hole at the bottom. The design helps the beekeeper open the back of the
cylinder in relative safety.
The experiences of beekeepers in luring the
bees to these cavities has generated many myths,
including one that held that an ox sacrifice was
necessary to build a hive successfully. Despite
these myths, beekeeping flourished in the
Mediterranean.
The Egyptian hiv5s spread all around the
Mediterranean and have undergone many modifications. The Greeks modified the Egyptian
design by baking the mud. Their hives were larger, with a 25-litre capacity. The oldest specimen
of such a hive dates back to circa 1450 BC. By the
Roman times, hives were made of hollow logs,
cork, woven wicker or fennel cylinders and,
sometimes, rectangular ones of board or brick.
But the basic design remained the same - a
long low cavity with a small entrance at one end,
and a door at the other. Beekeepers in northern
Europe, however, did not make artificial hives,
simply modifying natural ones. Some beekeepers would hang
hollowed logs from branches to attract swarms.
Commercial beekeeping took a huge leap forward when hives
were taken out of the trees and brought to the ground. Two
methods of constructing beehives came to be evolved: one
used cloorless log or cork hives whose open tops were covered
with a plank or flat stone; the other, developed about 2,000
years ago in northern Europe, used inverted woven baskets -
a precursor of the skep, which was made from coiled straw.
These were fatal for bees as the honey was harvested by plunging the baskets in water or by burning sulphur. Despite this,
skeps caught on with design modifications. By AD I 100, skeps
were arranged into protective walls called bee holes. Soon bee
houses were being built to protect the hives from bears, skunks
and hedgehogs, and to protect bees from the bitter winter.
In 1649, Reverend William Mew nailed a set of wooden bars across a cavity, so bees wake
comb one layer to a bar. He also installed a
ters to control the access of the bees. But thi
complex contraption was commercially unvi
able.
In 1'790, Swisg naturalist Francois
built the leaf hive a set of 12 frames hi
together at the back. At the right dist
between frames, thel,bees would build one
of the comb in each frame. In 1851, Rev L
Langstroth of Philadelphia discovered that
spacing between 2 combs in a natural situation
about I cm. He the devised the movable
hive that provided a foundation on which
bees could build boncycombs; the frame all
for simple removal'apd replacement of the
combs.
Modern versions of this hive consist oil
base, a hive body, I or more removable sect
and a weatherproof cover. The hive body consists of a b
chamber fitted with frames, where the queen lays eggs and
young are nurtured. Nowadays, honey is removed by
extraaor, in which centrifugal force is used to empty the
without damaging them. The bees don't have to build
cells before resuming honey production.
Beekeeping has become a sophisticated industry the
over with centres of study being set up in almost every rn
country. A lot of effort is made to keep the bees free of di
as they are very prone to infestations like the American
brood, caused by the spore forming bacterium Bacillus larva
or Noserna, caused by the protozoan Nosema apis.
But despite these efforts, humans have not succeeded an
domesticating bees. Honey gathering involves more learrunS
to accommodate the needs of bees rather than domesticating
them.
---Bhanusingha Ghosh is a research scholar at the Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi.
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