Traditions by region
Grouped broadly on purpose. A practice belongs to a community and a landscape rather than to a country, and several of the most important — Amazonian meliponiculture, the miombo bark-hive belt — cross national borders that mean nothing to the people or to the bees.
Sub-Saharan Africa22
The largest surviving body of traditional beekeeping anywhere: bark and log hives across the miombo belt, forest honey gathering in the Congo basin, and the only documented partnership between people and a wild bird that finds nests for them.
Middle East and North Africa19
Where the archaeology is. Fired clay survives in dry climates and almost nothing else does, so the horizontal clay cylinder — Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi — is the best-evidenced ancient hive on earth and the rest of the world's hives are invisible.
Europe38
Skeps, forest beekeeping in living trees, and a documentary record so much richer than anywhere else that it is routinely mistaken for the history of beekeeping rather than the history of one continent's paperwork.
South Asia17
Four native honey bee species harvested by four different methods, cliff harvesting in the Himalaya, licensed collectors working in tiger habitat, and wall hives built into houses.
East Asia6
Apis cerana kept in log and box hives, the longest continuous written beekeeping record outside the Mediterranean, and a bee that cooks hornets alive.
Southeast Asia11
The home of managed wild nesting: rafter boards and tikung planks that invite giant honey bees to build where they can be harvested, which is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
North America6
No native honey bee. Sweetness came from maple and mesquite, and the arriving Apis mellifera was recorded as a sign of what was coming behind it.
Central America and the Caribbean10
Where beekeeping was invented a second time. Maya meliponiculture is a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own deity and its own colonial tribute records.
South America4
The richest stingless-bee traditions on earth: dozens of named species per community, each with its own honey, its own use and its own harvesting rule.
Australia and New Zealand5
Sugarbag — Aboriginal harvesting of native stingless bees, with the knowledge of how to find a nest as much the tradition as the taking of it — alongside an entirely introduced Apis sector.
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.