History and culture
Ten thousand years of honey, and the place bees hold in myth, religion and language.
9 guides
A note on the folklore
Honey attracts attractive stories, and a good deal of what circulates as historical fact is unsourced or is a generalisation across cultures that had nothing to do with one another. Where the record is genuinely uncertain, these guides say so rather than choosing the better story.
- 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.
- Bees in myth, religion and languageBees turn up in more mythologies than almost any other insect. The recurring themes are worth noticing — and so is the temptation to flatten very different cultures into one story.
- Mead: honey's oldest useProbably the first alcoholic drink humans made, and almost certainly by accident. Mead is fermented honey and water, it spans a range as wide as wine's, and it very likely predates both beer and grape wine.
- How honey was produced before modern beekeepingFor most of human history, taking honey meant destroying the colony. The movable frame is barely 175 years old, and everything before it was a compromise between getting the honey and keeping the bees.
- Honey in ancient EgyptThe bee was a royal symbol, the beekeeper a recorded profession, and honey a medicine, an offering, a tax payment and a preservative. Egypt gives us the earliest detailed picture of organised beekeeping anywhere.
- Honey in ancient Greece and RomeThe classical world took bees seriously enough to write manuals about them, argue about where they came from, and get most of the biology wrong in ways that lasted until the seventeenth century.
- Honey traditions around the worldHoney turns up in ritual, medicine, marriage and law on every inhabited continent, and the patterns repeat in ways that are hard to explain by contact alone.
- Honey and bee symbolismBees have stood for industry, chastity, monarchy, resurrection, the soul and the perfect state — often simultaneously, and often on the strength of biology that turned out to be wrong.