Beekeeper bible issuu

chapter title

CONTENTS 11

bees and beekeeping history 79

understanding the honeybee 153

practical beekeeping 267

honey and other bee products 305

recipes and home crafts 398

index

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Introduction between humans and their bees is long and enduring. Honey, beeswax and mead (the alcoholic drink made from honey) are part of a worldwide industry, yet, in the twenty-first century, the numbers of honeybees are falling at an alarming rate, due to a mysterious condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder, which emerged late in 2006 and for which no one has yet discovered the cause. It is only as more and more of the world’s honeybees die that we are now beginning to appreciate not only how fragile their survival really is but also their importance to the agricultural economy globally owing to their pollination of crops. If bees are to survive into the

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HISTORIC

RELATIONSHIP

twenty-second century, we must take them seriously now.

The Collins Beekeeper’s Bible aims to offer all of us an opportunity to become better acquainted with bees – with their history, their evolution and biology, and with the practical aspects of beekeeping and produce. The book also gives detailed information about bees and bee colonies, bee products and their uses and provides recipes for making your own products. While it should provide valuable information for those who are already beekeepers, it also aims to interest anyone considering getting their first colony or who is simply interested in the background to one of our most fascinating insects.

the honeybee in myth and symbol

The Honeybee in Myth and Symbol other bee gods and goddesses both bees and the honey they so magically produce have featured in myth and philosophy. The flowing sweetness of honey has, since ancient times, been associated with great eloquence (‘honeyed words’), while features of bee society and behaviour have long been identified with our own. A dominant female is still a ‘queen bee’ in common parlance, and when we work hard we are ‘as busy as a bee’ or appear as a ‘hive of industry’.

Such symbolism has its roots in the ancient cultures of the world.

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HROUGHOUT HISTORY,

sometimes identified with Demeter, the goddess of the earth and crops, who represented the soul sent to hell. The bee also symbolises the soul that flies away from the body in the Siberian, Central Asian and South American traditions.

Northern Europe Nanosvelta, a Roman-Germanic goddess, carries a staff with a beehive on top.

ciated with life after death, there is a spring of mead, the

Europe had a bee god called Babilos and a goddess

alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water.

called Austeia.

In Russia, images of a bee god, Zosim (believed to have discovered beekeeping), were placed in beehives

Siva (commonly known as the Destroyer) has another, lesser-known form as Madheri (the Suave One), represented by a bee above a triangle.

for protection.

The Mordva, an indigenous Russian people, had a beehive god who was the eldest son of their

bees in mythology

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rise, zenith and sunset. In the highest step, which is asso-

The Poles, Livlanders and Silesians in eastern

mother-goddess.

Our relationship with the honeybee goes back thousands of years, to the dawn of human history.

Prehistoric spiritual rock art executed by the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa, whose descendants still live in the Kalahari, abounds with images of bees and their nests, suggesting that bees had a special importance in the Stone Age. Indeed, the bee is part of the creation myth of the San: an exhausted bee, having carried a mantis across a river, left the mantis on a floating flower; before the bee died, however, it planted a seed in the mantis’s body. That seed became the first human.

While there is a gap in our archaeological knowledge from the Stone Age to the first beekeepers of ancient Egypt, we can see from the mythology of ancient civilisations how bees held a sacred significance and mythical power, often appearing as a sacred insect that acted as a bridge between the natural world and the underworld.

Images of bees appear on some tombs and others – specifically Mycenaean tombs – were shaped as beehives.

Bees symbolise vital principles and embody the soul. According to the ancient Greeks, the bee was

Vishnu is also represented by his three ‘steps’ (with which he strode across the universe), encompassing sun-

Africa Bees in Egypt were believed to be the tears of Ra, the sun god and the giver of life and resurrection.

The Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari believe bees are

India (Hinduism)

the carriers of supernatural power.

Kama, the Indian god of love, is often depicted with bees (like his Greek counterpart Eros) – symbolic of the bittersweet nature of love.

Vishnu, Krishna and Indra together are called the

This simple prehistoric cave drawing in La Cueva de la Araña in eastern Spain shows how early humans plundered wild bees’ nests for honey.

Ancient Maya The ancient Maya of Mesoamerica kept native stingless bees (see page 31) and celebrated the bee god, Ah

Madhava or Nectar-born Ones: Vishnu is shown as a

Mucan Cab, on the fifth month in their 13-month calen-

blue bee on a lotus flower (a symbol of life and resurrec-

dar, by downing honey and balché, an alcoholic honey

tion) and Krishna is often depicted with a blue bee on

drink. They also gave burnt offerings and asked for abun-

his forehead.

dant flowers so the bees could produce plenty of honey.

In western Asia, a great mother–fertility goddess, known variously as Ma, Anaitis, Rhea, Cybele, Istar, Atergatis, Artemis and Diana was worshipped.

Her cult reached its zenith in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (in present-day Turkey; see page 15), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. At the temple are two Roman copies of a wooden statue of Artemis, originally created in the eighth century BC and decorated with bees carved in relief.

Artemis’s priests were known as Essenes or ‘king bees’ and were likened to the bee nymphs or

Mellissae that feature in Greek mythology (see page 23). These bee nymphs also gave the gift of prophecy to Artemis’s twin, Apollo, whose shrine at Delphi is one of the most significant historic sites of ancient Greece. The priestess at Delphi, through whom Apollo foretold the future, was known as the Delphic Bee. Bee mythology also persists in Hinduism (see box above), and the qualities represented by bees continue to appear in modern religions (see pages 16 and 18).

Bees and beekeeping history 13

the honeybee in myth and symbol

the honeybee in myth and symbol

vides for all’ – a notion taken up by later writers.

In the Georgics (see pages 33–4), he describes bees as a model for commerce, with the hive as a busy shop and the inhabitants as trading citizens.

mythology of the origin of bees The origin of bees was regarded as a source of fascination to many ancient cultures. In Greek mythology, the

Bees were once thought to be representative of a perfect society – loyal to their queen and labouring together incessantly for the good of the commonwealth.

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I / In a cowslip’s bell I lie’ Shakespeare, The Tempest (V.i)

god Aristaeus, son of Apollo, is often credited with being the first beekeeper, having been taught to tend bees by Mother Earth Gaia’s nymphs. According to the legend, Aristaeus fell in love with Eurydice, wife of Orpheus who, in haste to escape Aristaeus’s unwanted attentions, trod

The bees, as model citizens, deserved only the best beekeepers. The Roman writer Varro (see page 33) claimed bees ‘detest the lazy’, evidenced by their culling of the drones. And Columella dedicated a

on a serpent that bit and killed her. In punishment, Eurydice’s nymphs destroyed Aristaeus’s precious bees.

In order to recover his bees, Aristaeus had to appease the nymphs by slaughtering four bulls and four heifers, leaving their carcasses for nine days in a leafy grove as a sacrificial offering. Miraculously, at the end of this period, bees swarmed from the carcass and Aristaeus was able to rebuild his hive and pass on his knowledge of beekeeping to humankind.

This belief that bees were born from the carcasses of dead animals persisted for centuries (see page 53).

bee symbolism The qualities of bees and their community in the hive have offered a source of inspiration since ancient times. Like honey, they are associated with eloquence and the power of the spoken or written word (see pages 20 and 24). The word for ‘bee’ in Hebrew, dbure, is related to the word dbr, ‘speech’.

(The biblical name ‘Deborah’ derives from this too.) According to legend, some bees settled on the lips of Plato when he was a baby, indicating his future brilliance with words. A similar legend attaches to other famous figures of the past, including Sophocles (also known as the ‘Attic Bee’ because of his industriousness), Virgil and Saint Ambrose, the patron saint of beekeepers. And there

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are texts from India in which the bee represents the spirit intoxicated with the ‘pollen of knowledge’.

A model of human society The workings of the bee community have fascinated writers and philosophers down the ages, serving as a model or illustration for their ideas about human society. Many writers of antiquity who observed bees closely – such as Aristotle in his Historia Animalium (see page 50) – drew parallels between apian and human society, and found much to admire in the former. Firstly, there was the bees’ orderly industriousness and cooperation.

Virgil (70–19 bc) had a notion of a commonwealth of bees, where ‘All’s the state; the state pro-

Statue of a fertility goddess, often decorated with bees.

chapter of his De re rustica (see page 26) to bee husbandry, insisting that perfect honesty is vital, for bees revolt against ‘fraudulent management’.

Bee society appears in the work of much later writers. William Shakespeare in Henry V (I.ii.

187–204) offers a fable of bees as a pattern of commonwealth in time of war (he would have had ready access to Virgil’s Georgics IV). The first use of bee society as a lesson for a young prince was in Seneca’s De Clementia, written for his pupil Nero.

Thomas Elyot also used it for the young Edward VI. Again in the context of war, Leo Tolstoy – a keen beekeeper himself – makes a detailed analogy between Moscow, devoid of inhabitants after its capture by Napoleon, and a ‘queenless hive’ in War and Peace (1869): In a queenless hive no life is left, though to a superficial glance is seems as much alive as other hives … To the beekeeper’s tap on the wall of the sick hive, instead of the former instant unanimous humming of tens of thousands of bees … the only reply is a disconnected buzzing from different parts of the deserted hive. From the alighting board, instead of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey and venom, and the warm whiffs of crowded life, comes an odour of emptiness and decay mingling with the smell of honey.

Bees and beekeeping history 15

the honeybee in myth and symbol

the honeybee in myth and symbol

In ‘The Bees and the Beekeeper’, one of Aesop’s Fables, a thief steals the honeycombs of a swarm of bees; the bees, believing the beekeeper to be responsible, attack and sting him. The fable: a warning to those who leave themselves unguarded against enemies, yet push away their friends, believing it is they who are plotting against them.

A political and economic model In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Song: Men of England, written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, in which demonstrators for parliamentary reform had been harshly dispersed by armed cavalrymen, the political lyric pictures capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the parasitic class (the drones) and the working class (the worker bees). It is a rallying cry for the English working people to rise up against their political masters and oppressors and to free themselves from economic exploitation.

The hive was used by others as a model for democracy, where the individual bee subsumes its individuality for the good of the colony, and as a symbol of monarchy, tyranny and dictatorship.

The efficiency of the social system depends on the absolute rule of the queen.

The hive was also used as a model for economic principles. In 1714 Dutch-born philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) published The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, consisting of a poem, ‘The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest’ and a commentary on it.

The poem, a political satire on eighteenth-century England, presents a bee community that is thriving – if corrupt – until a number of the bees decide to turn from corruption and self-interest to honesty and virtue. As a result, there is a sharp drop in

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prosperity and the bees lose the hive, thereby illustrating how ‘private vices’ are necessary to produce ‘public benefit’. Regarded as cynical and offensive at the time, the book was nonetheless very influential, offering an early examination of the workings of capitalism not fully developed until the likes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

The bee is considered an emblem of Christ: his mildness and mercy on one side (honey) and his justice on the other (the sting).

Bees flying down to three hives, from the twelfth-century Aberdeen bestiary.

It was said that a swarm of bees settled on baby Ambrose’s face, leaving behind a drop of honey and presaging his honeyed tongue.

A Christian symbol St Ambrose, a fourth-century bishop of Milan in Italy, saw the bees’ apparent purity, chastity and industrious behaviour as an allegory for the monastic life, and wrote numerous religious texts for the education and guidance of the early Church. While, according to the Confessions of St Augustus, ‘Ambrose bore his celibacy with hardship’, he knew from Virgil and other ancient schol-

ars that sex played no part in the life of the worker bee, and he encouraged Christian monks to think of the bee and its chaste, hard-working life as a model for their own.

An emblem of thrift and industry Because of their association with selfless hard work, bees and their hives have frequently been adopted as a symbol by various groups. The

Bees and beekeeping history 17

the honeybee in myth and symbol

bees in heraldry The bee is the most popular insect found in heraldry, and even the beehive occurs often as a crest. As a sacred emblem of Egyptian royalty, the bee began to be seen as a symbol of Wisdom. To the Merovingians, therefore, the bee was a most hallowed creature and 300 golden bees were discovered stitched to the cloak of Childeric I (son of Meroveus) when his grave was unearthed in 1653.

The Stuart kings of Britain claimed descent from the Merovingians and the exiled Stuarts in Europe adopted the bee. Emperor Napoleon, in turn, had bees attached to his own coronation robe in 1804 (claiming this right by virtue of his descent from the natural son of King Charles II). Napoleon’s adoption of the bee as his personal badge also gave the bee considerable importance in the French armoury. It appeared on the mantle and pavilion around the armorial bearings of the French empire.

Freemasons, who had as their founding principles thrift and industry, orderliness and stability, used the beehive as a symbol in official documents and drawings.

In the nineteenth century, pioneers of the Cooperative Movement in Rochdale in Lancashire, England, used representations of the wheatsheaf (a bound bundle of harvested wheat stalks) and the beehive in their official seals, because ‘One ear of wheat cannot stand up on its own, with others in the form of a wheatsheaf it can; and one bee cannot survive alone, in a beehive with others, it thrives.’

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormonism sought to combine the ideals of the new America – a free nation, determined to forge ahead through

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The bee is still used to denote industrious activities such as a ‘spelling bee’ or a ‘quilting bee’. hard work and an orderly society working for common goals – with its religious beliefs, and chose as its emblem the beehive, using it to consolidate its identity. When persecution drove the followers of the Church west, they took their bees with them to what is now Salt Lake City, Utah. The Book of Mormon features ‘Deseret’, meaning ‘honeybee’, and in the Deseret Times of 1881 the skep (see page 37) was described as a ‘significant representation of the industry, harmony, order, and frugality of the people, and the sweet results of their toil, union and intelligent cooperation’. The state of Utah is now known as the Beehive State.

ABOVE:

On a grave of an American entrepreneur in Ohio, a

beehive stands as a symbol of productivity.

OPPOSITE:

Freemason George Washington, with the beehive

symbol of Freemasonry visible in the bottom right-hand corner.