Getting the honey
Taking honey from a colony, wild or kept, and the techniques that recur across unrelated traditions because the problem is the same everywhere.
25 practices · what it is for
- Smoking a colonyHarvesting method · Widespread 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 nightHarvesting method · Widespread 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 cuttingHarvesting method · Practised, 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 harvestingHarvesting method · Practised, 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 accessHarvesting method · Practised, 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 nestHarvesting method · Practised, 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 harvestHarvesting method · Widespread 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.
- Owning a wild colonyCultural use · Practised, 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.
- Himalayan cliff honey huntingHoney hunting · Practised, 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 honeyguidesHoney hunting · Local 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 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.
- Boran honey gathering with honeyguidesHoney hunting · Current 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 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.
- Sundarbans honey collectingHoney hunting · Local 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 huntingHoney hunting · Local 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 harvestingHoney hunting · Practised, 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.
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong deltaBeekeeping tradition · Local 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.
- Dwarf honey bee harvestingHoney hunting · Widespread 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.
- 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.
- Awer honey hunting with honeyguidesHoney hunting · Local 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 AsiaHoney hunting · Practised, 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.
- 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.
- African stingless bee harvestingStingless-bee keeping · Practised, 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.
- Mechanised honey extractionHarvesting method · Widespread 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.