Honey hunting

Definition

Depicted in rock art across Spain, southern Africa and India, and continuing today wherever the bees cannot be hived. Apis dorsata builds single open combs that defeat every attempt at domestication, so Malaysian tualang honey and Sundarbans mangrove honey are hunted rather than farmed — the first from fifty-metre climbs at night, the second in tiger country under licence. Nepalese cliff honey is cut from Apis laboriosa nests reached by rope ladder.

Where the word gets used loosely

Romanticised in photography and increasingly distorted by tourism. Paid demonstration climbs raise harvest frequency beyond what colonies sustain, and the international market for mad honey is a direct driver of over-harvesting on a small number of Himalayan cliffs.

Honey records that discuss this

• Himalayan cliff honeyStrong, dark and complex, with a bitter herbal edge and a slightly astringent finish. Spring harvests are frequently sharper and more bitter than autumn ones.

Guide records that discuss this

• A history of beekeepingFrom cliff-face honey hunting to the movable frame, the history of beekeeping is a history of one problem: how to take the honey without destroying the colony.
• A history of honeyFor most of human history, honey was the only concentrated sweetness available. Almost everything about its cultural weight follows from that, and from how abruptly it ended.
• The Cueva de la Araña honey gathererThe most reproduced image in the history of honey, and almost always reproduced with a confident date it does not carry. What the painting shows is clear enough. When it was painted, and what the figure is standing on, are not.
• Why traditional honey hunting is decliningAcross the honey-hunting traditions HoneyHQ catalogues, the same handful of pressures recur — and one of them is conservation designation, which sometimes ends the practice it was meant to protect.

Question records that discuss this

• What is the oldest picture of honey hunting?The figure at the Cueva de la Araña near Bicorp in eastern Spain is the best known and usually cited as the oldest: a person climbing towards a rock cavity, reaching in, holding a container, with bees around them. Its date is a bracket several millennia wide rather than the single figure usually quoted, and southern African and Indian rock art contains further honey scenes whose dating is at least as uncertain.
• What is the difference between honey hunting and beekeeping?Honey hunting takes honey from a wild colony the hunter did not site or manage, and usually destroys it. Beekeeping means the colony lives somewhere a person provided and is tended over time. In practice the two are ends of a gradient, and most of the world's traditional beekeeping sits in the middle of it.
• Do people still hunt wild honey?Yes, in many places and by many methods — cliff harvesting in the Himalaya, rafter and board systems in Southeast Asia, licensed collecting in the Sundarbans, forest gathering across Africa. Almost all of it is contracting, and some of what appears in films is a paid demonstration rather than a subsistence harvest.
• Is honey hunting sustainable?It depends on the method and on who owns the nest, not on how old the practice is. Cutting only the honey band leaves a living colony; taking the whole comb ends it. Both are traditional, and which one a community uses tracks whether the harvester expects to come back.