How Honey From the Hive Has Shaped Our Lives
World Honey Bee Day lands on the 21st of August, creating a buzz for all things honey bee. Megan Nicholl talks more about how bees and honey shape lives all across the world…
Illustration by Nathalie Dickson.
While honey bees are arguably one of the most beloved insects (who doesn’t love honey?), it’s no secret that bees are suffering as a result of human-induced habitat loss, pesticide use and disease. Honey bees contribute to the pollination of 80% of flowering plants worldwide, including crops, making them essential for ensuring the health of diverse ecosystems and global food security. But we should care about them beyond their ecological and agricultural contributions. Not only are they a keystone species environmentally, but they have also been key in the evolution of human culture. We have shaped them as much as they have shaped us, so where do the origins of our intimate relationship lie? How did they come to be managed by our ancestors? And how have honey and beeswax been used over millennia?
The History of the Honey Bee
Belonging to the order Hymenoptera, honey bees are classified within the family Apidae and comprise the single genus Apis, Latin for ‘bee'. There are 8 extant species that are generally recognised and these can be categorised into 3 clades, depending on their nesting behaviour. The first clade, the dwarf honey bees (Apis florea and Apis andreniformis) construct small single-comb, open-air nests on the branches of trees or shrubs. The second are the giant honey bees (Apis dorsata and Apis laboriosa), also construct simple, exposed nests on high tree branches or overhanging cliffs. The most derived species (Apis mellifera, Apis cerana, Apis nigrocincta and Apis koschevnikovi) comprise the remaining clade of cavity-nesters, whose nests consist of multiple combs. Of all 8 species, it is Apis mellifera that you are probably most familiar with as “the honey bee”, being the species most commonly used in apiculture (beekeeping) and agriculture due to the desirable characteristics that lend themselves to commercial use. With a native range that spanned Europe, Africa and the Middle East, several subspecies of A. mellifera can now be found on every continent except Antarctica as a result of human-assisted migration.
The relationship humans have developed with honey bees is one that has not been established with any other insect. To understand how this relationship developed, we must venture back 135 million years ago to the Cretaceous period, where the evolutionary origins of the honey bee are thought to begin with a predatory wasp that started to supplement it’s diet of insects with protein-rich pollen. Gradually, the wasp evolved to gain all its nutritional requirements from pollen alone and so it became the first bee. Luckily for us, a few of these early bees have been frozen in time in fossilised tree resin (amber). The oldest bee that we have preserved in this way dates back 100 million years, although similarities between wasp and bee DNA suggest that the earliest bees evolved 128 million years ago, coinciding with the rapid diversification of flowering plants. But it wasn’t until around 48 million years later that some of these bees transitioned from a solitary to a social lifestyle exhibited by stingless bees, bumblebees and honey bees today.
Honey Bee Exploitation and Management
While bees were evolving, our own ancestors were still small, rodent-like creatures. While both our ancient mammalian ancestors and honey bees managed to survive the asteroid impact that led to the demise of non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we would not resemble hominins for almost another 60 million years. We know that honey had become a staple part of our diet by the Upper Palaeolithic period (40,000 – 8,000 years ago) because of the abundance of rock art that can be found across the world depicting people collecting honey. Some of these artworks portray the use of ladders to access high up beehives, or the use of smoke to subdue bees within the hive. The consumption of honey – an accessible, calorie dense food that required no processing and little energy expenditure to acquire – may have even aided the energetically expensive expansion of our brain size 1.5 – 2 million years ago.
But it wasn’t just honey that our ancestors were exploiting from beehives. A lump of organic matter containing beeswax, plant resin and possibly egg dating from the Upper Palaeolithic, was found in South Africa. It had deep grooves in its surface that were revealed to be from the binding of a wood-based twine, suggesting it was most likely used to attach stone points to wood to form spears. Our uses of beeswax expanded over time, as our ancestors transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Farming required storage and preservation of food including meat, cheese and dairy. At a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, Neolithic pots associated with storing such foods were also found to contain traces of beeswax, which could have been used as a waterproofing agent to increase the longevity of the pots and the food within. Furthermore, this chemical ‘fingerprint’ of the beeswax could be traced back to A. mellifera. While we cannot say whether the beeswax associated with these particular pots were from wild or domesticated A. mellifera, it is likely that at some point these prehistoric agriculturists started to actively manage them.
The earliest solid evidence we currently have for beekeeping is from ancient Egyptian artwork dating back to 2445-2421 BCE. The beehives used would have been crude and poorly designed for cavity-forming species, containing no internal structures and were composed from pottery or dried mud and straw. By the time pottery hives had reached Greece, they were designed with interior grooves where the bees could attach their comb. Varro (116-27 BCE), a scholar from ancient Rome, described the use of wicker to construct round hives, or ‘skeps’. Although symbolic of beekeeping, traditional skeps are now illegal in many countries because the honeycomb cannot be removed for inspection, leading to colonies being killed to enable harvest. Similar issues and colony losses are also an issue with log hives, commonly used in Africa. By the eighth century, box hives were being used in Vietnam. Beekeeping in Asia was slower to emerge, possibly because species of honey bee there build exposed open nests that lend themselves to honey robbing. Honey robbing is still practised by some indigenous tribes of Africa and Asia, where men climb to dangerous heights to raid hives. Honey constitutes fifteen percent of the diet of the Hadza, a modern hunter-gather people in Northern Tanzania, who use the aptly named honey guide bird Indicator indicator to assist them in finding hives. In western countries, the invention of Langstroth hives in the mid-nineteenth century, with its removable frames allowing honey comb inspection and removal with minimal disturbance to the colony, enabled beekeeping to become commercially viable on a global scale.
Uses of Honey and Beeswax
Before modern medicine, many cultures heavily relied on the natural world for remedies and cures. Honey became a staple medicinal treatment for a range of health complaints in many different cultures throughout history. Modern research shows that honey has anti-oxidant, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties that aid in the induction tissue repair, making it a highly effective topical treatment for wounds and burns. Other uses included the treatment of stomach complaints, coughs, respiratory disorders and heart disease, all of which have been clinically shown to improve with the use of honey. It has even been shown to induce cell death in cancerous tumours.
The importance of honey for human physical and spiritual wellbeing is mentioned by several major religious texts, and honey is often used in many religious celebrations. Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) is often celebrated by eating apple slices dipped in honey to symbolise the hope of a sweet and prosperous new year. Buddhists celebrate Modhu Purnima (Honey Full Moon Festival) by offering honey to monasteries to commemorate when Buddha was nourished by honey offered to him by a monkey while in the wilderness. Jatakarma, a rite of passage performed by Hindus, celebrates the birth of a child, during which ghee and honey are placed onto the baby’s lips while the name of God is whispered into the baby’s ear. In Islam, the Qur’an contains an entire surah called an-nahl (The Bee), which presents the honey bee as a model system with characteristics that humans should endeavour to echo.
Beeswax also has religious significance. The ancient Egyptians soaked linen strips in beeswax to wrap around dead bodies during the embalming process. It was also used posthumously by the Romans to preserve the faces of the dead through wax death masks. Candles formed from beeswax or tallow (animal fat) were commonplace before paraffin candles, and the burning of candles is symbolic in many faiths. Perhaps shining a light on our past to illuminate our historical cultural connection to honey bees will help us remember why their preservation is vital beyond the contributions they make to the environment and to our dinner plate.
Thank you to Nathalie Dickson for her beautiful illustration. You can find more of her work on her Instagram at @nathalied_art
Megan Nicholl
Megan is an MSc Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology graduate from the University of Exeter. Her interests lie in the evolution of cooperation and social behaviour and she hopes to continue in this area of research in the future. She is at her happiest when she is outside exploring with her dog or turning her love of wildlife into cross-stitch. She has a particularly soft spot for bumblebees. You can find her on Twitter @MeganH_Nicholl.