Honey in ancient Rome

Beekeeping as a business

Roman agricultural writers discuss apiaries the way they discuss vineyards. Varro's Res Rusticae covers hive siting, materials and the economics of the operation, including what an apiary might return. Columella devotes a book of De Re Rustica to bees. Pliny the Elder collects everything known and a good deal that was not.

That is a different genre from the Greek material, and it is the reason the two are worth separating. Aristotle is asking what a bee is. Varro is asking what an apiary yields.

What honey and wax were for

• Sweetening, at a scale no other substance could supply, in a society with no sugar.
• Preserving fruit, and preparing meat and fish dishes in the sweet-savoury register the surviving recipe collection is full of.
• Mulsum and conditum — honeyed wines drunk before meals and spiced for keeping.
• Medicine, in the humoral system, and as a wound dressing and a vehicle for other ingredients.
• Wax for writing tablets, for lost-wax casting, for sealing, for waterproofing and for lighting.

The wax half matters more than it is usually given credit for. Routine Roman administration ran on reusable wax tablets, and the volume that consumed made wax an industrial input rather than a by-product.

The hive as an ideal state

The fourth book of Virgil's Georgics is a beekeeping manual written as poetry, and it is where the Roman conception of the colony as a model polity — orderly, industrious, self-sacrificing, ruled by a king — is set out most memorably. That political reading of the hive outlived Rome by a very long way, and it only became untenable once the ruling bee was shown to be female.

Bougonia, and the observation behind it

The belief that bees are generated spontaneously from the carcass of a slaughtered ox is set out at length in the Georgics with a full procedure: seal a young bullock in a confined space, kill it without breaking the hide, stop the openings, and wait for bees to emerge. Virgil presents it as practical instruction and Roman agricultural writers repeat it.

Moving hives, and how early

Classical sources describe hives being moved to follow flowering, including rafted along rivers. It is the ancestor of modern migratory beekeeping, and the dating needs care: the accounts of Egypt in particular are Greek and Roman descriptions of Egyptian practice rather than Egyptian records, and the practice is better attested for the Ptolemaic and Roman periods than for the pharaonic one.