Food
Honey and brood as things people ate: cooked with, preserved in, baked into and traded as food.
17 practices · what it is for
- Eating broodCultural use · Local 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.
- Mad honeyCultural use · Local 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.
- Hadza honey gatheringHoney hunting · Practised, 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.
- Congo basin forest honey gatheringHoney hunting · Practised, 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.
- Sugarbag huntingStingless-bee keeping · Local 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.
- San honey gathering in the KalahariHoney hunting · Current 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.
- Amazonian stingless bee knowledgeStingless-bee keeping · Practised, 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.
- Fermented pot honeyCultural use · Local 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.
- Preserving food in honeyCultural use · Local 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 cookingCultural use · HistoricalHoney 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 drinkCultural use · HistoricalHoney 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 AfricaCultural use · Widespread 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 cookingCultural use · HistoricalHow 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.
- Honey as hospitality and as a giftCultural use · Widespread 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 in Jewish practiceRitual and ceremony · Widespread 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.
- Honey and wax in warCultural use · HistoricalHoney 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.
- Harvesting and eating bee pollenCultural use · Widespread 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.