History of Honey in Egypt

The history of honey dates back to 3000 BC. At that time Lower Egypt was called Bee Land while Upper Egypt was Reed Land. Honey was first recorded as being used in medicine for basic cuts and scrapes. The Ebers Papyrus of the Ancient Egyptians around 1550 BC uses honey as the primary medicinal agent more than 147 of its healing formulas. The bee is featured frequently in Egyptian hieroglyphs and was favored by the pharaohs, often used as a symbol of royalty. The ancient Egyptians used honey as a sweetener, as a gift to their gods and even as an ingredient in embalming fluid. Honey was used to preserve the pharaohs that were mummified as a symbol of royalty. Honey cakes were baked by the Egyptians and used as an offering to the gods. The oldest know contraceptive was used in Egypt around 1500 BC. The women used a barrier of crocodile dung mixed with honey.

Sources:

http://www.health-benefits-of-honey.com/historyofhoney.html

http://www.natural-honey.org/history_of_honey.htm

http://www.honey-for-health.com/history-of-honey.html

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/birthcontrlhist/

Honey Culture in China!

Check out this awesome information about how honey fits into Chinese culture!

"The daily habit of many Chinese people is to add a bit of honey to milk, eat it on bread, and also simply stir it into warm water every morning for breakfast."

"Instead, it is used for its nutritionally rich functions, including removing toxins from the blood and dispelling pathogenic heat. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is also used for enhancing yin, or cold energy."

"As written by Pharmacist Li Shizhen from the Ming Dynasty, which lasted from 1368 to 1644 in the text Compendium of Materia Medica, honey can be used to help with many ailments including the removal of pathogenic heat, pain reliever, a way to fight dehydration, and as a power anti-oxidant."

All of the information presented in this blog post is from: http://www.holisticchineseherbs.com/food/honey.html

Mayan Honey

Did you know?

Mayan Priests specifically bred stingless honeybees for religious ceremonies.

Honey was used as a sweetener, antibiotic and an ingredient for the Maya version of mead (Balche), a fermented drink.

• The hallucinogenic properties come from tan alkaloid in the bark of the Balché tree
  
• Toxic and hallucinogenic substances can be found in all honey, if bees collect nectar and pollen from certain types of vegetation.
  
• It is a combination of the two, since balché is made from both the Melipona honey gathered from the Balché flowers, and from the bark of the tree, brewed and fermented together.
• Modification of honey production produced "psychoactive" effects and the consumption was integrated into worship ceremonies. Honey laced with narcotics was common.

"Ah Muzencab" Deity for Bees, Honey, Beekeeping and Creation

The Mayan word for honey is the same Mayan word for "world"

The name of the native honey bee is called "Xunan-Kab"




Works Cited:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0628_050628_maya_bees.html

Bee-lletpoints about Honey in Ancient Greece

* Ambrosia and nectar, the food and drink of the Greek gods, were made of honey. Zeus "was raised on honey."

* The Iliad refers to honey as the food of kings.

* Legend has it that every day, doves would bring ambrosia to Zeus to give out amongst the other gods.

* Attic honey - honey from the region of Attica (not your attic), which includes Greek capital Athens - was especially known for its nutritional and medicinal value.

* Hippocrates ("the father of medicine") wrote, "Honey and pollen cause warmth, clean sores and ulcers, soften hard ulcers of lips, heal carbuncles and running sores."

* Other ancient physicians used honey to treat diarrhea, constipation, and coughs.

* Sometimes, ancient Greeks applied honey topically to prevent bodies from decaying.

* It also according to legend made humans immortal.

* Sugar was unknown to Greeks so honey was used as their natural sweetener.

* Oxymel, a moixture of water, honey, and vinegar, was a common medicinal drink in ancient Greece, used to treat what we now call the common cold.

* Fermented honey was believed to have preceded wine as a common entheogen -- that is, a psychoactive substance used in a religious, spiritual or otherwise ritualized context.

(honey-health.com; greekmedicine.net; livestrong.com; greekproducts.com; mythencyclopedia.com; heml.mta.ca; en.wikipedia.org)

Bees in the News (plus BONUS industrialization rant)

One of my favorite Internet habits is to check the visual journalism blog of the New York Times, called Lens.  Their February 10th "Pictures of the Day" post featured the following image of a St. Haralampie celebration in Bulgaria, complete with mentions of honey, jars and beekeepers!

Screen shot of the blog post.

Aside from this being a beautiful, honey-toned photograph, the image is remarkable in that it captures a ritual that seems exotic and foreign to many onlookers in the United States.  That insects and their sticky product can be cause for religious celebration inspires curiosity in us and yields a perception of awe that is not necessarily rooted in empathetic understanding.  I believe that, especially after today's lecture on commercial honey and the industrialization of honey/pollination, it is important to note that our efficiency-driven, capitalist market view of the precious process that is honey production strips the bee of its dignity.  Instead we should revere the honey bee and (while we're at it) sanctify the craft of apiarists, as the Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria do with their patron saint of beekeepers.

As it stands now, bees are herded en mass like cattle to the almond orchards of California in an act that defies their natural instinct for flight and flower diversification.  They are a mechanism of production in a market with high demand, whose consumers perhaps do not understand the origin increasing costs.  I used to naively think that almonds were expensive because they were rare, when in fact, there are miles and miles of almond-producing trees whose price arises from the necessary inputs of the mono-culture crop.  

One of my classmates illustrated this point excellently using the allegory of industrial crop fertilizer being like mass pollinator bee rental.  When you have farmland with plants that are nearly genetically identical (i.e. only almond trees, no other plants), the ecosystem must work harder to maintain highly fertile production (since diversity = awesome), so you need (artificial, usually) fertilizer.  Likewise, if we have orchards of purely almond trees, there is no way bees can naturally fertilize them (they would get bored, weaken from lack of nectar/pollen diversity, etc.), so half the U.S. population of bees must be shipped in to sustain the current system.  As with the artificial fertilizer problem, however, this is not working.  Bees are dying, and the population must be sustainably brought up in the West instead of humans relying on shipping them across the country.

While it seems that capitalists and economists hate bees, the silver lining for me has been that I recently found out The Royal Economic Society of the United Kingdom has a BEE in their logo!  Check it out:

I couldn't find information about the exact meaning or purpose behind the logo itself, but I found that their July 2008 newsletter featured an interview with an Adam Smith expert that mentions bee imagery in a statue of Mr. Smith.  Here is the relevant excerpt (skip to brown):

JS: : Taking this last point, can we examine the statue in greater detail? I notice that you have embodied a number of artifacts or tools on sections of the statue which have individual significance as far as the work of Smith is concerned; eg the plough, the bee hive, the globe, Smith’s academic gown, the bales of corn and of course Smith’s covered hand over the globe — the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.

AS: Yes. If we take the hive first. The hive concept, which is borrowed freely from Bernard Mandeville’s ‘The Fable of the Bees’, is symbolic of numerous elements of Adam Smith
— a monumental figure On the 4th of July on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh the long-awaited statue to Adam Smith was unveiled. Below is an account of an interview that John Struthers of the University of the West of Scotland held with the Sculptor Professor Alexander Stoddart. Professor Stoddart is widely regarded as Scotland's most renowned monumental sculptor and is based at the Paisley campus of the university where he is also an Honorary Professor of Arts and Media. The statue was unveiled by Nobel Laureate Professor Vernon L Smith.14
Smith’s contributions; eg The famous pin factory and the concept of the division of labour — just like a bee hive full of hard work and productivity. The ‘workers’ are akin to the bees in the hive — industrious, proud, and working collectively — a venerable ‘maelstrom of economic activity’. This is where we get the term ‘hive of industry’ from. Around the hive are several banding tapes. These represent, respect for property, and respect for persons. In fact they represent the Rule of Law or respect for property rights which is now recognised as an essential part of Smith’s economic philosophy. Not a stifling or stultifying bureaucracy, but an enabling and benevolent authority or government — minimum government in fact.

Well, that's all I've been thinking of for now, folks.  Thanks for reading!

Diana

Information Sources:

Picture Post: Praise bee - a mass for St. Haralambos by Rob Sharp for The Independent

Happy St. Haralampi Day by Turlough for Propolis 

Royal Economic Society Newsletter Issue 142 (pdf)

Stand Aside, California Wine

Where does Cali get all its cash? Wine, right? Nope, it turns out that California's #1 horiticultural export is almonds! That's right, in this great piece in the Guardian, Allison Benjamin writes that in 2007 almonds earned the state of California, "more than $1.9bn, double the revenue from its Napa Valley vineyards." Ok, clearly almonds are a defining feature of California's landscape and economy.

And almonds needs bees. Bees come from far and wide to help California pollinate their colossal almond crop. But with colony collapse and the rest of the erratic weather shaking planet earth, bees are harder and harder to come by. Apparently this year is crazy than ever - the bee deficit is driving almond prices up. The Daily Green reported last week that the price of renting a colony for Cali is through the rough. "Three weeks ago if you asked $150 rent for colony you'd be laughed right out of the almond orchard. Today, $200 isn't an uncommon offer, and the line goes out to the parking lot for growers wanting to pay that amount."

How much does colony rental factor into almond prices? Check this out. The biggest almond producer in the world, Paramount Farming, was featured in the Economist. The president of the company reported that renting bees now makes up 15% of the total cost of the company's costs. If bees continue to disappear, we'll soon be paying something short of the price of gold for all our favorite fruit and nut crops.

Special Valentine Post: Bee Pickup Lines!

Gimme a buzz and I'll bee yours.


Bee mine.
Bee my love.
Bee my drone.
Bee my honey.
Bee my queen.




Pollinate me.


Honey, I'm stuck on you (CUZ I'M COVERED IN HONEY).


You're bee-utiful.


My heart beeats for you.


You're sweeter than honey (not true, nothing is).


Honey, you're the bee's knees!


Honey, your thorax is huge!


This might sting...


Every day with you is like a honeymoon.

Wanna do the waggle dance?


If you were a bee, I'd keep you!


You're so hot, you make my colony collapse!


I don't think you're ready for my royal jelly.


How 'bout we get together and cross pollinate?

Bees in Popular Culture & Media Presentation

Check it out HERE.

My presentation documents three main trends in popular media representation of bees:

- wordplay (bee v. the letter B v. the verb form "be" v. the occasion bee [e.g. spelling bee])

- bee, honey, pollination, etc. in analogies for romance or sex

- anthropomorphic representations of bees and bee life (and the inaccuracies or misunderstandings that result)

"They flyin' out of the box...he ain't got the queen yet"

Here’s a little gem I found on youtube about a Louisiana woman who found a swarm of bees (or as she says, “this brown stuff all over my driver’s side window”) on her car and called 911.

While this might seem like a pretty dangerous situation, as Jesalyn told us in class and like Danny talked about in his presentation, bees aren’t likely to sting when they’re swarming beecause they don’t have a hive to protect and defend. Like you can see in Diana’s post below, it’s possible to touch bees when they’re swarming, like the guy who just grabs the handful on the tree, but most people are afraid of them anyway. Who ever thought a trip to Marshalls could end so badly?!

Another reason that a bee might be reluctant to sting you for no reason is beecause it will kill her. A honey bee has a barbed stinger which will stay in the skin if you are stung and when she flies away, she’ll tear her abdomen. Here’s a video of that happening:

One crazy thing about bees is that, as we discussed in class on Thursday, the bees in a hive essentially act as one organism instead of fifty-thousand or so different creatures. Bees are eusocial and act out of the interests of the entire hive instead of individual interests. One reason for this collaboration is the queen bee and the pheromones she emits—like Joey talked about in his presentation, bees put out certain scents which help them communicate to accomplish all of their honey-making tasks and also to help defend their precious hive. For example, bees emit an alarm pheromone (which Jesalyn says smells like bananas) which will alert other bees if one is endangered and they will come to her aid. So basically, if a bee needs to, she will sting and die for her hive without hesitation. Pretty wild.

Here’s a third video about the waggle dance that maybe isn’t the most engaging but is still crazy. It’s about using vector calculus to communicate. Though that may not be entirely accurate, bees would probably do better in calculus than I did!

Putting the "HERO" in PHEROMONES and "WARM" in "SWARM"

Honey bees came over, and bears were like, this is really awesome.
--- Jesalyn


Yesterday Joey gave us a mini-lecture on bee pheromones that clarified one of the questions that came up during my queen bee presentation.  I couldn't explain how drones knew when the virgin queen bee was on her inaugural mating flight.  The answer?


PHEROMONES.


So Joey/Pheromone Hero explained that many of the seemingly random or instinctive behaviors of bees are actually carried out using an odor communication system.  While I presumed they just magically knew what to do and when, bees are actually chatting all the time, in a language we've come to learn much about (even to the point where scientists have created artificial pheromones).  They have pheromones in all varieties and for uses like alarming other bees, deterring puberty, and other insane/useful purposes.  


I could see how it would be easy to exploit human knowledge of pheromones, as we saw in Danny's presentation on swarms.  How they get humans to have "bee beards" is using a necklace with a compartment for the queen bee.  Once the queen is captured in said necklace, you can place it around your neck and the bees will swarm around it, attracted to their fearless leader.  It's pretty awesome, but I can't imagine that Macy's is dying to carry queen bee necklaces or bee beards any time soon, though.  



Here's a video that demonstrates (with kooky Canadian narration) how the bee beard is done.


Some remarkable things I learned about swarming from Danny is that a scout bee will check out potential hives then come back and try to persuade the colony to move there with much movement.  Depending on how excitedly he beats his wings and moves around, the colony decides whether to follow him.  It's pretty funny to imagine the human equivalent of this, as board rooms or other venues where "pitches" are made would be hilarious with a dancing businessperson.  Lots of them would likely be unsuccessful.


THEN at one point in his presentation we watched The Most Dramatic YouTube Video Ever.  Okay, so it's actually just a hand and some bees, but the person in the video a) recorded the incredibly loud sound of a swarm and b) played with the bees like they were mounds of Play-Doh.  I KID YOU NOT.  You have to see it to believe it:






Wild, eh?  My favorite part is the camera-hogging bee who steals the spotlight.


Another highlight of the mini-lectures was talking about a man who ran with a swarm, causing NPR to suggest it could become an extreme sport.  I imagine the bees would get annoyed at having something fleshy and terrestrial trying to hang out with them, but maybe not.  I'd really like to see someone in our class try this.  Any takers?  I'll be ready with my camera.