Historic bees belong to the ages and to our future

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“Bake your honey cake, All browning and sweet.

Bake it at 3 o’clock for tea, Bake it for you and for me.” —Jo Fredell Higgins

Welcome to the New Year 2022. May it be one of joy and plenty.

Kings and priests regarded the sanctity of the bees and found their intricate combs secreting the golden essence to be the miraculous interconnectedness of life.

The earliest known bees lived 100 million years ago in northern Burma. The most diverse primitive specimens came from Baltic amber 40 to 55 million years ago. Bumblebees form ground nests where the queen alone survived the Winter. Between 20 and 10 million years ago, social bees began storing honey.

A bee takes nectar from a clover. Dustin Krueger/The Voice

Cave paintings have been the oldest proof of honey’s importance. Shortly after the ice age receded, Spanish cave dwellers drew naked people working together with ropes and buckets to gather the honey from cliff faces.

Originating in Africa and spreading from the Cape of Good Hope to the Urals, several subspecies developed into four branches: African, Oriental, North Mediterranean and West Europe. Tradition gives credit to a holy man, St. Mo Domnoc, with bringing a swarm to Ireland, but the Old Irish language suggests a much earlier arrival.

President Thomas Jefferson said that honeybees were not native Americans, though a species with no sting, inhabits Brazil.

A more recent fossil discovery In Nevada revealed that bees were present in the Miocene era (23-25 million years ago) though they later became extinct. The Minoan hieroglyphs document hives. Around 2600 B.C. Egyptians were using beeswax figures in sorcery and honey was used in religious ceremonies and as taxation.

Although the Bible makes it clear that “lands flowing with milk and honey” were blessed, the Dead Sea Essenes provided the first evidence of Jewish beekeeping. Only a few prehistoric traces of Greek beekeeping can be found. The bees’ timeless importance is shown by the wealth of myth and ritual use of honey.

Romans took up beekeeping later than the Greeks. There is Aristomachus who studied bees for 58 years. Virgil delights in their buzz on sunny afternoons. Hives should be entrusted only to a dependable gardener. In fact, his Georgics IV offers a complete portrait of a countryman’s excellent garden fit to feed a king.

He doubted that a dead hive could be revived by wintering it indoors or warming it in Spring with the hot ashes of a fig tree.

In Russia, the penalty for obliterating a hive was severe. It was the price of 15 cows, six horses, or 120 sheep. Irish Brehon Laws spell out obligations and penalties. For instance, a man would be punished if his hens ate a neighbor’s bees. Ancient laws governed owners’ rights and taxation. Abbey servants were licensed to own bees or collect honey and swarms from trees bearing their mark. From early mediaeval times, they formed dignified guilds with appointed officials. Those officials in Slav and German lands were called Zeidler and they policed the forests.

Monasteries’ need for candle wax involved them heavily in beekeeping. The first microscopes offered revelations that went through the landscape of myth, religion and folklore. Mythic narratives and religious practices would provide moral and political metaphors for daily life.

Do you have a bee in your bonnet about this New Year? Is there honey in the pantry? Does she speak with honied words? Will you be as busy as a bee?

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