Honey in ancient Greece

Honey as a divine food

Honey in Greek culture is ambrosial before it is agricultural. The infant Zeus is fed on honey and goat's milk in the Cretan cave; nectar and ambrosia are the food of the Olympians; Aristaeus is credited as the divine originator of beekeeping. The nymphs who nursed Zeus are called Melissae, bees, and priestesses at several sanctuaries carried the same title.

It is also the sweetener of an entire cuisine, the base of honeyed wine, and a preservative. And it belongs to the dead: honey is poured in chthonic libations and offered at tombs, which is one of the best-attested ritual uses anywhere in the ancient world.

Aristotle looks inside the hive

The Historia Animalium contains the first systematic observations of bee behaviour that survive from anywhere, and a great deal of it is remarkably good. Aristotle describes flower constancy — that a forager works one species per trip — division of labour by age, the transfer of nectar between bees, and the difference between the three kinds of bee in a colony. He is also explicit that the origin of bees was not settled, and sets out competing accounts rather than choosing one.

He got the reproduction wrong, and the error was consequential. The ruling bee is described as male, and the resulting picture of the colony as a kingdom rather than a matriarchy shaped how Europeans wrote about bees until Jan Swammerdam's dissections in the 1660s established the ruling bee as a laying female. Two thousand years is a long time for one observation to stand uncorrected, and it stood because nobody looked.

Hymettus, and the first branded origin

Thyme honey from Mount Hymettus near Athens was named as the finest available by author after author, Greek and later Roman. It is one of the earliest recorded instances anywhere of a food traded on geographical reputation rather than on what it is — which means it is also, necessarily, one of the earliest opportunities for origin fraud. Greek thyme honey still trades on the same reputation today.

The hives themselves

Greek beekeeping is unusually well evidenced archaeologically, because it used fired clay. Ceramic hives with combed interior surfaces, and the extension rings that let a beekeeper add volume, have been excavated in Attica and elsewhere — in several cases identified only after the sherds had sat in catalogues for decades labelled as something else.

The interior scoring is the detail that identifies them: it gives comb something to key onto. That is a solved engineering problem in a fired pot, and it is the sort of evidence that makes classical beekeeping a practice rather than a literary subject.