Traditions by what it is for
The cut that `kind` could not make. A hive system and a keeping tradition are different kinds of object doing the same job; a Roman honey sauce and a batik wax pot are the same kind of record doing entirely different ones. Practices carry more than one value where they genuinely serve more than one purpose, which is common.
Getting the honey25
Taking honey from a colony, wild or kept, and the techniques that recur across unrelated traditions because the problem is the same everywhere.
Housing and keeping bees40
Giving bees somewhere to live and then working with them — the container, the siting, the calendar and the ownership.
Food17
Honey and brood as things people ate: cooked with, preserved in, baked into and traded as food.
Drink6
Fermented and unfermented. Mead is one member of a family that includes tej, balché and honey beers, and it is not the senior one.
Medicine and the body9
What honey, propolis, venom and the rest were used FOR on the body. Recorded as documented use, which is a fact about people and never a claim about effect.
Religion and ritual15
Offering, festival, liturgy and observance, each attached to a named tradition and a period rather than to a religion in the abstract.
Craft and material12
Beeswax as a material: candles, casting, sealing, painting, dyeing and waterproofing. For most of history the more valuable half of what a hive produced.
Trade, payment and ownership23
Honey and wax as tax, tribute, rent and property, and the customary tenure that governs who may take a wild nest.
Birth, marriage and death5
Birth, marriage and death. The customs cluster at thresholds, in societies with nothing else in common.
Why some groups are missing
A value appears here only once at least 4 practices sit behind it. The vocabulary has more values than this page shows, and the missing ones are gaps in the catalogue rather than in the world — several of them are subjects this site intends to cover and has not yet.