Honey hunting
Taking honey from wild colonies nobody sited or manages. A named tradition, practised by identifiable people in an identifiable place.
12 practices · type of practice
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.