Traditions
How people get honey, and have got it: named hunting traditions, harvesting techniques, hive systems and stingless-bee keeping, with who practises each, where, with which bee, and whether anyone still does.
107 practices · 89 still carried out
What is recorded here, and what is not
Every record names the communities a practice is documented among, the period the record describes, and whether anyone is known to be doing it now. Where the current status is not established, it says so rather than guessing: a practice described in a monograph from 1961 is evidence about 1961. Nothing here claims a tradition is unchanged or ancient without evidence for it, and the field that says what each page is not claiming is required by the schema.
What a practice is for
The cut that crosses everything else. A hive system and a keeping tradition are different sorts of object doing the same job; a Roman honey sauce and a batik wax pot are the same sort of record doing entirely different ones. Practices appear under more than one heading where they genuinely serve more than one purpose.
Every way in
Each axis is a set of real URLs rather than a filter widget, so every one of them is linkable, indexable and works with scripting switched off. A value only gets a page once enough records sit behind it to make the page worth opening.
- By type of practiceHunting, harvesting technique, hive system, keeping tradition, use or ritual.
- By whether it is still practisedLiving, declining, revived, historical, reconstructed, performed for visitors, or genuinely unknown.
- By what it is forHarvesting, keeping, food, drink, medicine, religion, craft, trade or life cycle.
- By regionWhere the practice is or was carried out, by macro-region.
The whole catalogue, by what it is
Every published record, grouped by kind — a named tradition, a technique, a hive form, a use or a rite.
Honey hunting
Taking honey from wild colonies nobody sited or manages. A named tradition, practised by identifiable people in an identifiable place.
- Himalayan cliff honey huntingPractised, decliningHarvesting the open combs of the Himalayan giant honey bee from overhanging rock faces, on rope ladders, with fire and smoke, in mid-hill Nepal and adjacent ranges. The most photographed harvesting tradition in the world and one of the least accurately described.
- Yao honey hunting with honeyguidesLocal living practiceHoney hunters in northern Mozambique call a wild bird, which leads them to nests it cannot open, and open the nest it found. It is the partnership that was tested experimentally rather than merely observed, and the experiment is why it is here.
- Hadza honey gatheringPractised, decliningAmong the Hadza of northern Tanzania honey is a large and measured share of the diet, several bee species are taken by different methods, and the honeyguide partnership operates on terms that contradict the tidy reciprocity story.
- Boran honey gathering with honeyguidesCurrent status unknownThe tradition in which guiding was first quantified rather than anecdotally reported. Fieldwork in northern Kenya in the 1980s measured how much the bird shortens the search, and established that the guiding carries directional information.
- Congo basin forest honey gatheringPractised, decliningAmong Mbuti, Aka and Baka forest peoples the honey season reorganises the year: camps move, work shifts, and honey becomes a major food and the subject of song. It is one of the clearest cases anywhere of a harvest that is a social season rather than a task.
- Sundarbans honey collectingLocal living practiceLicensed seasonal collectors entering the mangrove forest to take giant honey bee combs, in tiger habitat, under a permit system. Among the most hazardous harvesting traditions still practised anywhere, and one of the few regulated by a state.
- Western Ghats rock-bee honey huntingLocal living practiceAdivasi communities in the Nilgiris and the wider Western Ghats harvesting Apis dorsata combs from cliffs and tall trees, with cooperative marketing that changed what collectors are paid and, with it, how the harvest is done.
- Tualang tree honey harvestingPractised, decliningClimbing emergent rainforest trees at night to take giant honey bee combs, in peninsular Malaysia and adjacent forests. The climb is the whole difficulty: colonies cluster in the crown of a tree that may be seventy metres tall.
- Dwarf honey bee harvestingWidespread living practiceThe small, common, unremarked harvest. Apis florea builds a single palm-sized comb around an open branch, holds a modest amount of honey, and is taken casually across South and Southeast Asia by people who would not describe themselves as honey hunters.
- San honey gathering in the KalahariCurrent status unknownHoney gathering documented among San communities across the Kalahari and its margins, alongside an extensive southern African rock-art record showing bees, combs and gatherers whose relationship to that practice is not straightforward.
- Awer honey hunting with honeyguidesLocal living practiceHoney hunters in the Boni forest of coastal Kenya summon greater honeyguides with a whistle blown through a pierced snail shell, and follow them to honey bee nests. A third documented human-honeyguide partnership, with its own signal and its own social position.
- Giant honey bee harvesting in mainland Southeast AsiaPractised, decliningHarvesting Apis dorsata across Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, where the same migratory bee is taken from forest trees, from cliff faces and from wooden rafters set out to attract it. One bee, several quite different relationships with it.
Harvesting method
A technique rather than a tradition — smoke, night working, selective comb cutting — recurring across many unrelated cultures because the problem is the same everywhere.
- Smoking a colonyWidespread living practiceThe one technique that appears in every documented harvesting tradition on earth, and in the earliest depictions. It works by interfering with alarm communication and by making bees gorge, and both effects were understood thousands of years after the practice was universal.
- Harvesting at nightWidespread living practiceIndependently arrived at across Asia, Africa and the Americas for the same three reasons: the foragers are home, the defensive response is reduced, and the colony is easier to displace than to fight.
- Selective comb cuttingPractised, decliningTaking only the honey-storing portion of a comb and leaving the brood, so the colony survives to be harvested again. The single distinction that decides whether wild harvesting is sustainable, and it is a skill rather than a rule.
- Destructive whole-nest harvestingPractised, decliningTaking the entire comb, brood included, and ending the colony. Historically normal across much of the world, including in European skep beekeeping, and the practice the movable frame made unnecessary rather than the practice tradition uniformly avoided.
- Rope and ladder accessPractised, decliningThe engineering half of honey hunting. Nests sit on overhangs and forty metres up emergent trees, and every tradition that reaches them has solved the access problem with fibre, wood and nerve.
- Tracking bees to a nestPractised, decliningFinding the nest is the hard half, and there are only three ways to do it: follow the bee, follow the sound, or follow an animal that already knows. All three are documented, and the first has been formalised into a technique on at least two continents.
- Rendering wax after the harvestWidespread living practiceWhat happens to the comb once the honey is out. For long periods and in several economies the wax was worth more per kilogram than the honey, and in parts of Africa some of it is deliberately left for the bird that found the nest.
- Mechanised honey extractionWidespread living practiceSpinning honey out of intact comb instead of crushing it, so the comb goes back to the bees. The invention that turned the movable frame from a curiosity into an economic proposition.
Hive system
The container. Log, bark, clay, basket, wall cavity or box, and each one is a solution to a climate, a bee and an economy rather than a step on a ladder.
- Fixed-comb hivesWidespread living practiceThe category almost every traditional hive belongs to: the bees attach comb directly to the container, so it cannot be lifted out. That single fact determines how the hive is harvested, whether it can be inspected, and why harvesting was destructive for most of history.
- Log hivesWidespread living practiceA hollowed section of trunk, closed at both ends, with a small flight hole. The most widespread hive form on earth, in continuous use from Ethiopia to the Himalaya to the Yucatán, and the direct ancestor of both the Egyptian clay cylinder and the modern top-bar hive.
- Bark hivesWidespread living practiceA cylinder of bark stripped whole from a living tree, sewn or pegged into a tube and hung high in the miombo woodland. It supports one of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere, and it raises a genuine and much-argued question about the trees.
- Clay and pottery hivesPractised, decliningHorizontal cylinders of fired or unfired clay, stacked in rows and worked from the rear. The best-evidenced ancient hive on earth, for one reason: it is the only material that survives, so the archaeological record of hives is really the record of this design.
- Straw skepsRevivedA dome of coiled straw bound with split bramble, the standard European hive for centuries and the reason the beehive symbol looks the way it does. It ended not because it stopped working but because it could not be inspected for disease.
- Bee bolesHistoricalRecessed alcoves built into garden and field walls to shelter skeps from rain and wind. Thousands survive across Britain and Ireland, and they are the only physical evidence of beekeeping in many places that left no documents at all.
- Wall hivesPractised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
- Hung cylinder hivesWidespread living practiceCylinders of bark, bamboo, basketry or hollowed wood, sealed with dung and hoisted high into trees away from the homestead. The dominant form in Ethiopia and across much of East Africa, and the reason harvesting there is a climb.
- Gourd, basket and improvised hivesWidespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.
- Cork hivesPractised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
- Collective apiariesPractised, decliningPurpose-built shared structures holding hundreds of family-owned hives, with allocation, maintenance and guarding organised communally. Documented in the Maghreb, southern Arabia and central Europe, and among the most striking pieces of beekeeping architecture anywhere.
- Top-bar hivesWidespread living practiceA horizontal hive in which bees build comb down from removable bars rather than into frames. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s as an intermediate technology, with a Greek movable-comb precedent from around 1800, and neither traditional nor a frame hive.
- The jobónPractised, decliningA hollowed log section closed with discs at both ends, stacked horizontally on racks under a shelter. The hive of Maya meliponiculture, and a design that solves the specific problem of harvesting a nest built in pots rather than in comb.
- The Langstroth hiveWidespread living practiceA box of hanging frames spaced so the bees leave the gaps clear, which lets a keeper lift out a single comb without destroying anything. The design most of the world's managed colonies now live in.
Beekeeping tradition
A whole way of keeping bees in one place: the hive, the siting, the calendar, the ownership and who does the work.
- Ogiek forest honey and hive rightsPractised, decliningLog hives hung in the Mau forest, marked and inherited, and a legal case in which forest beekeeping was treated as evidence of indigenous land rights. The clearest example anywhere of a honey practice becoming a matter of law.
- Tikung boardsLocal living practiceShaped planks hung in seasonally flooded forest in West Kalimantan for giant honey bees to build on. The bees are entirely wild, the boards are owned and inherited, and the arrangement is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong deltaLocal living practiceAngled poles set in melaleuca forest in southern Vietnam, inviting giant honey bees to build where they can be worked. The same solution as tikung, arrived at in a different forest with a different tree.
- Nile valley beekeepingPractised, decliningStacked horizontal clay cylinders worked from the rear, moved along the river to follow flowering. Depicted from the third millennium BCE and still recognisable in twentieth-century Egyptian practice, which makes it one of the longest documented continuities in beekeeping.
- Ethiopian beekeepingWidespread living practiceOne of the largest hive populations of any country, worked with hung cylindrical hives in trees away from the homestead, supplying a honey-wine culture with a documented place in religious and social life.
- Tree beekeepingRevivedCavities cut into living pines high above the ground, worked from a climbing rope, with the colony otherwise left to itself. The largest beekeeping system of medieval eastern and central Europe, lapsed almost entirely in the twentieth century and deliberately restarted in the last two decades.
- Zeidler forest beekeepingHistoricalForest beekeepers in medieval central Europe holding defined rights, obligations and in places their own jurisdiction. The clearest case anywhere of honey production organised as an institution rather than as a household activity.
- Bashkir tree beekeepingLocal living practiceCut cavities in living pines in the Burzyan forests of the southern Urals, worked with a dark forest bee and a climbing strap. One of very few tree-beekeeping traditions that did not lapse, and the practice the Polish revival drew on.
- Keeping the Asian honey beeWidespread living practiceLog hives, wall cavities and box hives for Apis cerana across South, Southeast and East Asia. A different animal from the western honey bee in ways that break European management assumptions, and the reason imported frame-hive advice so often fails.
- Japanese box-hive beekeepingLocal living practiceStacked wooden boxes for Apis cerana japonica, harvested once a year by taking the top box. A minority practice alongside a much larger introduced Apis mellifera sector, sustained partly by a bee that can defend itself against giant hornets.
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeepingLocal living practiceHollow-log and stone-cavity hives stacked in walls and moved between wadis to follow the sidr flowering, producing one of the most expensive honeys in world trade.
- Moving hives to follow floweringWidespread living practiceCarrying colonies to successive flowerings — up a mountain, down a river, across a region — long before lorries. The direct ancestor of industrial migratory pollination, and a practice with a documented history in the Mediterranean, the Nile valley and Arabia.
- Slovenian bee houses and painted panelsLocal living practiceStacked box hives in a purpose-built shed, with the front board of each hive painted with folk narrative, satire and religion. A folk art form that exists because of a hive design, and a beekeeping culture with unusual institutional continuity.
- Korean mountain beekeepingPractised, decliningKeeping the native Asian honey bee in log and plank hives in the mountain villages of Korea, harvested once a year in autumn. A tradition defined by a bee that resists intensive management and by the forest it depends on.
- Miombo woodland beekeepingWidespread living practiceHanging bark cylinders in the miombo woodlands of south-central Africa, in numbers, and selling the honey and wax into a trade that has run for well over a century. One of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere.
- Migratory beekeepingWidespread living practiceLoading colonies onto vehicles and moving them to a crop or a honey flow. An old idea — the Nile and the Mediterranean did it by boat — running today at continental scale on lorries.
- Commercial pollinationWidespread living practiceRenting colonies to growers for the duration of a bloom, under contract, at a price per hive. For many large operations it is now the main revenue line and honey is the by-product.
- Queen rearing and the bee tradeWidespread living practiceProducing queens and bees as products in their own right — grafted queens, packages in the post, nucleus colonies — which is what lets an industry replace its losses on a schedule.
- Urban beekeepingWidespread living practiceHives on roofs, balconies, allotments and hotel terraces. Genuinely productive, socially useful, and routinely justified with a biodiversity argument the evidence does not support.
Stingless-bee keeping
Meliponiculture and wild meliponine harvesting. A different bee, a different hive, a different honey and a different set of uses.
- Sugarbag huntingLocal living practiceAboriginal harvesting of native stingless bee nests across northern and eastern Australia. Finding the nest is the tradition as much as taking it, and the knowledge is embedded in story, song and seasonal indicators rather than held separately from them.
- MeliponicultureRevivedKeeping stingless bees for honey, wax-resin and pollination, in log sections, clay pots or purpose-built boxes. Practised independently across the Neotropics, Australia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, and constrained everywhere by the same biological limit.
- Maya meliponiculturePractised, decliningKeeping Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives across the Yucatán peninsula: a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own ceremonies and its own colonial tribute record, now reduced to a fraction of the colonies recorded two generations ago.
- The decline of Yucatán meliponicultureRevivedOne of the few cases anywhere in which the ending of a cultural practice has been measured rather than described. Colony counts across the Yucatán peninsula, repeated decades apart, document a steep fall — and give the reasons.
- Brazilian meliponicultureWidespread living practiceThe largest organised stingless-beekeeping sector in the world: many species kept in rational box hives, a legal framework governing colony keeping and movement, and the biggest research community working on any of this.
- Amazonian stingless bee knowledgePractised, decliningThe richest honey classifications on earth: indigenous communities across Amazonia distinguishing dozens of stingless bee species by name, each with its own honey, its own uses and its own harvesting rules. Almost none of it is in English.
- Australian native bee keepingWidespread living practiceKeeping Tetragonula and Austroplebeia in purpose-built boxes across eastern and northern Australia. A modern hobbyist and pollination sector, distinct from — and sometimes in tension with — the Aboriginal sugarbag tradition it sits alongside.
- Kelulut keepingWidespread living practiceStingless beekeeping across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand that has expanded rapidly from a traditional base into a commercial sector, bringing with it price premiums, health claims and an authenticity problem arriving at the same speed.
- African stingless bee harvestingPractised, decliningMeliponula and related genera harvested from ground and tree nests across sub-Saharan Africa, valued medicinally and priced well above Apis honey, and almost entirely absent from the international meliponiculture literature.
- Philippine stingless beekeepingWidespread living practiceKeeping Tetragonula biroi in boxes across the Philippines, driven by university research programmes and by demand for pollination in mango and coconut. A young sector built partly on older Indigenous knowledge of the same bee.
Cultural use
What honey, wax or brood is for beyond food — payment, offering, medicine, hospitality, craft.
- Eating broodLocal living practiceIn most harvesting traditions the larvae are food, and a nutritionally significant one. The modern picture of honey as a jar of clear liquid is a processing artefact; what a harvester carries home is comb containing honey, pollen, wax and brood.
- Owning a wild colonyPractised, decliningWild colonies are property in a great many traditions, held by marking a tree, inheriting a cliff section, or being allocated a rafter board. It is the least discussed and most consequential thing about wild harvesting, because tenure is what makes sustainable cutting rational.
- Mad honeyLocal living practiceHoney from rhododendron nectar carrying grayanotoxins, harvested deliberately in the Himalaya and the Black Sea region and used in small quantities. One of very few traditional claims about honey with a confirmed pharmacological mechanism, and a genuine poisoning hazard.
- Fermented pot honeyLocal living practiceStingless bee honey ferments readily because it is wetter than Apis honey, and several traditions treat that as the point rather than as spoilage — deliberately aged, soured and drunk.
- TejWidespread living practiceEthiopian fermented honey drink, flavoured with gesho, made domestically and commercially and drunk in hospitality, celebration and religious contexts. The largest honey-drink tradition anywhere by consumption.
- Preserving food in honeyLocal living practiceFruit, nuts and occasionally meat stored in honey, in several unconnected traditions, for a reason that turns out to be sound chemistry rather than folklore.
- Honey in Roman cookingHistoricalHoney as a routine kitchen ingredient in Roman cooking, used in savoury dishes as freely as in sweet ones, and documented in the largest surviving body of ancient recipes.
- Honey in ancient Greek food and drinkHistoricalHoney in Greek eating and drinking: cakes for festivals and offerings, honey with cheese, honeyed wine, and a named regional honey treated as better than the rest.
- Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North AfricaWidespread living practiceA family of pastries and fried sweets finished with honey or sugar syrup across the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, Anatolia and the Maghreb — and an honest account of which of them actually use honey.
- Honey in medieval European cookingHistoricalHow European kitchens sweetened before cane sugar became affordable, what honey was used for, and the spiced honey cakes that outlived the era that produced them.
- Mead makingRevivedFermenting honey and water into alcohol — the simplest possible fermented drink, made across much of Europe and beyond, revived commercially in the last few decades.
- Honey beers and ferments of sub-Saharan AfricaLocal living practiceFermented honey drinks made across a wide band of sub-Saharan Africa, from the Xhosa iqhilika of South Africa to the honey beers of Central African forest communities.
- Honey as hospitality and as a giftWidespread living practiceHoney offered to guests, given to seal agreements and presented as a high-status gift, in several unconnected traditions — and the practical reasons a food ends up in that role.
- Honey at weddingsLocal living practiceHoney given to a couple at marriage in several traditions — and a careful look at the honeymoon story, which is repeated everywhere and supported by much less than it appears.
- Honey at birth and namingLocal living practicePlacing honey on a newborn's lips or tongue is documented across many separate traditions. It is also unsafe, and this page states both facts rather than choosing between them.
- Honey in funerary practiceHistoricalHoney poured as a libation to the dead, placed in graves and used in funerary meals across several ancient traditions — kept firmly apart from the much weaker claims about preserving bodies.
- Honey and wax as tax, rent and tributeHistoricalStates and landlords took honey and beeswax as payment across several continents and many centuries — which tells us what the products were worth better than any price list.
- Honey in Islamic traditionWidespread living practiceA chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee, honey in the prophetic medical tradition, and the effect both have had on a modern trade in high-value regional honeys.
- Honey in Buddhist traditionWidespread living practiceHoney among the substances monastics may store as medicine, an offering narrative attached to a festival, and a modern argument about whether honey is ethically consumable that reaches different conclusions.
- Beeswax candlesLocal living practiceThe largest single use of a bee product in European history: candles that burned clean enough for indoor use, made by a regulated trade, and demanded in quantity by the church.
- Lost-wax castingWidespread living practiceModelling an object in wax, encasing it, melting the wax out and pouring metal into the space it leaves. One of the oldest metalworking techniques, still in use, and responsible for a large share of the world's surviving ancient bronze sculpture.
- Wax writing tabletsHistoricalA wooden frame filled with wax, written on with a stylus and smoothed flat to be used again — the erasable notebook of the classical and medieval world.
- Wax seals and sealingHistoricalWax pressed with a matrix to authenticate a document or close a container — an authentication technology that worked because breaking it was obvious and forging it was hard.
- Encaustic paintingRevivedPigment bound in hot beeswax and worked onto a surface. The technique behind the Fayum mummy portraits, which look startlingly present two thousand years on because wax does not yellow or crack the way oil does.
- Wax-resist dyeingWidespread living practiceWax drawn or stamped onto cloth so that dye cannot reach it, then removed to leave a pattern. A living industrial demand for beeswax that almost no consumer connects to bees.
- Waxing, waterproofing and polishingWidespread living practiceThe unglamorous uses that consumed most of the wax most of the time: waterproofing, lubricating, protecting and polishing anything that had to survive weather or friction.
- Traditional uses of propolisWidespread living practicePropolis applied to wounds, taken for the throat, and used as a varnish, across a long documentary record — recorded here as what people did, with the question of whether it works handled elsewhere.
- Bee venom in traditional practiceLocal living practiceDeliberate bee stings applied for arthritis and other conditions, in a documented tradition with a real pharmacology, a marketed modern form, and recorded deaths.
- Bee omens and household customHistoricalA body of recorded custom treating bees as household members whose behaviour carried meaning: swarms read as omens, bees never sold for money, and the hive kept informed of family events.
- Slavic and Baltic bee customsHistoricalIn parts of eastern Europe and the Baltic, keeping bees together created a formal relationship between the keepers — a recorded kinship with obligations, and a word for it that still means friendship.
- Honey and wax in warHistoricalHoney as ration and as wound dressing, wax in military supply, and the one well-attested case of honey itself disabling an army — set against the beehive-catapult stories, which are much weaker than their popularity suggests.
- Honey drinks without alcoholWidespread living practiceHoney with water, with vinegar, with herbs, with milk or with citrus — a family of preparations that sat on the boundary between refreshment and medicine, and mostly on the medicine side.
- Honey on wounds and burnsWidespread living practiceThe longest continuously documented medical use of any hive product, running from Egyptian medical papyri to modern licensed dressings — and the one where the gap between tradition and evidence is narrowest but still real.
- Royal jelly production and useWidespread living practiceA hive product with almost no traditional history and a very large modern market, harvested by hand at enormous labour cost, and sold on a biological story that does not transfer to people.
- Harvesting and eating bee pollenWidespread living practicePollen taken from returning foragers with a trap, or eaten as bee bread straight from the comb — a food with a real traditional record in some regions and a modern supplement market much larger than that record justifies.
Ritual and ceremony
Observances attached to the bees or to the harvest. Recorded as documented practice with a date and a source, never as a general spiritual claim.
- BalchéLocal living practiceA fermented drink of stingless bee honey and the bark of the balché tree, used ceremonially in the Maya lowlands. Suppressed under colonial rule, documented across several centuries, and still made.
- Telling the beesHistoricalThe custom of informing a household's bees of a death, a birth or a marriage, and in some versions draping the hive in black or inviting the colony to the funeral. Recorded widely across northern Europe and the eastern United States in the nineteenth century.
- Honey in Hindu ritualWidespread living practiceHoney in the reception of an honoured guest, in the five-nectar offering, and poured over images in temple ritual — a living practice with an unusually deep and continuous textual record.
- Honey in Jewish practiceWidespread living practiceApple dipped in honey at the new year, honey and the sweetness of learning, and the questions of law that arise when honey is made by an insect that may not be eaten.
- Beeswax in Christian liturgyWidespread living practiceThe requirement that liturgical candles be made of beeswax, the Easter proclamation that praises the bees who made it, and the enormous demand that requirement placed on medieval beekeeping.
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religionHistoricalHoney as a temple offering in a state that ran its own apiaries, the bee as a royal symbol, and the solar origin myth that is quoted far more confidently than its source supports.
- Honey offerings in Greek religionHistoricalHoney poured to the dead and to the powers below, honey cakes as offerings, and the priestesses and prophetic figures Greek writers associated with bees.
- Maya ceremonies for the beesCurrent status unknownCeremonies performed for the increase and wellbeing of stingless-bee colonies in Yucatán, recorded in colonial description and in twentieth-century ethnography, and part of a religious complex built around a managed insect.
- Wax votives and figuresWidespread living practiceWax objects left at shrines — limbs, bodies, animals, whole figures — offered for healing or in thanks. A devotional practice that consumed wax in quantity and is still carried on.
By part of the world
Grouped broadly, because a practice belongs to a community and a landscape rather than to a country — and several of the most important cross national borders that mean nothing to the people or to the bees.
Sub-Saharan Africa
The largest surviving body of traditional beekeeping anywhere: bark and log hives across the miombo belt, forest honey gathering in the Congo basin, and the only documented partnership between people and a wild bird that finds nests for them.
- Yao honey hunting with honeyguides
- Hadza honey gathering
- Boran honey gathering with honeyguides
- Congo basin forest honey gathering
- Ogiek forest honey and hive rights
- San honey gathering in the Kalahari
- Awer honey hunting with honeyguides
- Log hives
- Bark hives
- Hung cylinder hives
- Gourd, basket and improvised hives
- Top-bar hives
- African stingless bee harvesting
- Nile valley beekeeping
- Ethiopian beekeeping
- Tej
- Miombo woodland beekeeping
- Honey beers and ferments of sub-Saharan Africa
- Honey as hospitality and as a gift
- Honey at birth and naming
- Lost-wax casting
- Wax-resist dyeing
Middle East and North Africa
Where the archaeology is. Fired clay survives in dry climates and almost nothing else does, so the horizontal clay cylinder — Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi — is the best-evidenced ancient hive on earth and the rest of the world's hives are invisible.
- Clay and pottery hives
- Wall hives
- Cork hives
- Collective apiaries
- Nile valley beekeeping
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeeping
- Moving hives to follow flowering
- Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North Africa
- Honey as hospitality and as a gift
- Honey in funerary practice
- Honey and wax as tax, rent and tribute
- Honey in Jewish practice
- Honey in Islamic tradition
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religion
- Lost-wax casting
- Encaustic painting
- Honey drinks without alcohol
- Honey on wounds and burns
- Migratory beekeeping
Europe
Skeps, forest beekeeping in living trees, and a documentary record so much richer than anywhere else that it is routinely mistaken for the history of beekeeping rather than the history of one continent's paperwork.
- Mad honey
- Clay and pottery hives
- Straw skeps
- Bee boles
- Cork hives
- Collective apiaries
- Top-bar hives
- Tree beekeeping
- Zeidler forest beekeeping
- Bashkir tree beekeeping
- Moving hives to follow flowering
- Slovenian bee houses and painted panels
- Telling the bees
- Preserving food in honey
- Honey in Roman cooking
- Honey in ancient Greek food and drink
- Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North Africa
- Honey in medieval European cooking
- Mead making
- Honey as hospitality and as a gift
- Honey at birth and naming
- Honey in funerary practice
- Honey and wax as tax, rent and tribute
- Beeswax in Christian liturgy
- Honey offerings in Greek religion
- Beeswax candles
- Wax writing tablets
- Wax seals and sealing
- Encaustic painting
- Wax votives and figures
- Bee omens and household custom
- Slavic and Baltic bee customs
- Honey and wax in war
- Honey drinks without alcohol
- Honey on wounds and burns
- Migratory beekeeping
- Queen rearing and the bee trade
- Urban beekeeping
South Asia
Four native honey bee species harvested by four different methods, cliff harvesting in the Himalaya, licensed collectors working in tiger habitat, and wall hives built into houses.
- Himalayan cliff honey hunting
- Mad honey
- Sundarbans honey collecting
- Western Ghats rock-bee honey hunting
- Dwarf honey bee harvesting
- Log hives
- Wall hives
- Gourd, basket and improvised hives
- Keeping the Asian honey bee
- Honey as hospitality and as a gift
- Honey at birth and naming
- Honey in Hindu ritual
- Honey in Buddhist tradition
- Lost-wax casting
- Wax-resist dyeing
- Honey drinks without alcohol
- Honey on wounds and burns
East Asia
Apis cerana kept in log and box hives, the longest continuous written beekeeping record outside the Mediterranean, and a bee that cooks hornets alive.
Southeast Asia
The home of managed wild nesting: rafter boards and tikung planks that invite giant honey bees to build where they can be harvested, which is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
North America
No native honey bee. Sweetness came from maple and mesquite, and the arriving Apis mellifera was recorded as a sign of what was coming behind it.
Central America and the Caribbean
Where beekeeping was invented a second time. Maya meliponiculture is a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own deity and its own colonial tribute records.
South America
The richest stingless-bee traditions on earth: dozens of named species per community, each with its own honey, its own use and its own harvesting rule.
Australia and New Zealand
Sugarbag — Aboriginal harvesting of native stingless bees, with the knowledge of how to find a nest as much the tradition as the taking of it — alongside an entirely introduced Apis sector.
Still carried out
Practices somebody is doing now, on current evidence rather than on the assumption that a tradition described once continues. Several of these are contracting, and each record says on what basis.
- Smoking a colony
- Harvesting at night
- Selective comb cutting
- Destructive whole-nest harvesting
- Rope and ladder access
- Tracking bees to a nest
- Eating brood
- Rendering wax after the harvest
- Owning a wild colony
- Himalayan cliff honey hunting
- Mad honey
- Yao honey hunting with honeyguides
- Hadza honey gathering
- Congo basin forest honey gathering
- Ogiek forest honey and hive rights
- Sundarbans honey collecting
- Western Ghats rock-bee honey hunting
- Tualang tree honey harvesting
- Tikung boards
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong delta
- Dwarf honey bee harvesting
- Sugarbag hunting
- Awer honey hunting with honeyguides
- Giant honey bee harvesting in mainland Southeast Asia
- Fixed-comb hives
- Log hives
- Bark hives
- Clay and pottery hives
- Straw skeps
- Wall hives
- Hung cylinder hives
- Gourd, basket and improvised hives
- Cork hives
- Collective apiaries
- Top-bar hives
- Meliponiculture
- Maya meliponiculture
- The jobón
- The decline of Yucatán meliponiculture
- Balché
- Brazilian meliponiculture
- Amazonian stingless bee knowledge
- Australian native bee keeping
- Kelulut keeping
- African stingless bee harvesting
- Fermented pot honey
- Philippine stingless beekeeping
- Nile valley beekeeping
- Ethiopian beekeeping
- Tej
- Tree beekeeping
- Bashkir tree beekeeping
- Keeping the Asian honey bee
- Japanese box-hive beekeeping
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeeping
- Moving hives to follow flowering
- Slovenian bee houses and painted panels
- Korean mountain beekeeping
- Miombo woodland beekeeping
- Preserving food in honey
- Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North Africa
- Mead making
- Honey beers and ferments of sub-Saharan Africa
- Honey as hospitality and as a gift
- Honey at weddings
- Honey at birth and naming
- Honey in Hindu ritual
- Honey in Jewish practice
- Beeswax in Christian liturgy
- Honey in Islamic tradition
- Honey in Buddhist tradition
- Beeswax candles
- Lost-wax casting
- Encaustic painting
- Wax-resist dyeing
- Waxing, waterproofing and polishing
- Traditional uses of propolis
- Bee venom in traditional practice
- Wax votives and figures
- Honey drinks without alcohol
- Honey on wounds and burns
- Royal jelly production and use
- Harvesting and eating bee pollen
- The Langstroth hive
- Mechanised honey extraction
- Migratory beekeeping
- Commercial pollination
- Queen rearing and the bee trade
- Urban beekeeping