Medicine and the body
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.
9 practices · what it is for
- 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.
- 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.
- Traditional uses of propolisCultural use · Widespread 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 practiceCultural use · Local 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.
- 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.
- Honey drinks without alcoholCultural use · Widespread 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 burnsCultural use · Widespread 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 useCultural use · Widespread 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 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.