Sub-Saharan Africa
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.
22 practices · region
- 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.
- Ogiek forest honey and hive rightsBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningLog hives hung in the Mau forest, marked and inherited, and a legal case in which forest beekeeping was treated as evidence of indigenous land rights. The clearest example anywhere of a honey practice becoming a matter of law.
- 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.
- Log hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA hollowed section of trunk, closed at both ends, with a small flight hole. The most widespread hive form on earth, in continuous use from Ethiopia to the Himalaya to the Yucatán, and the direct ancestor of both the Egyptian clay cylinder and the modern top-bar hive.
- Bark hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA cylinder of bark stripped whole from a living tree, sewn or pegged into a tube and hung high in the miombo woodland. It supports one of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere, and it raises a genuine and much-argued question about the trees.
- Hung cylinder hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceCylinders of bark, bamboo, basketry or hollowed wood, sealed with dung and hoisted high into trees away from the homestead. The dominant form in Ethiopia and across much of East Africa, and the reason harvesting there is a climb.
- Gourd, basket and improvised hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.
- Top-bar hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA horizontal hive in which bees build comb down from removable bars rather than into frames. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s as an intermediate technology, with a Greek movable-comb precedent from around 1800, and neither traditional nor a frame hive.
- 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.
- Nile valley beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningStacked horizontal clay cylinders worked from the rear, moved along the river to follow flowering. Depicted from the third millennium BCE and still recognisable in twentieth-century Egyptian practice, which makes it one of the longest documented continuities in beekeeping.
- Ethiopian beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceOne of the largest hive populations of any country, worked with hung cylindrical hives in trees away from the homestead, supplying a honey-wine culture with a documented place in religious and social life.
- TejCultural use · Widespread living practiceEthiopian fermented honey drink, flavoured with gesho, made domestically and commercially and drunk in hospitality, celebration and religious contexts. The largest honey-drink tradition anywhere by consumption.
- Miombo woodland beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceHanging bark cylinders in the miombo woodlands of south-central Africa, in numbers, and selling the honey and wax into a trade that has run for well over a century. One of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere.
- Honey beers and ferments of sub-Saharan AfricaCultural use · Local living practiceFermented honey drinks made across a wide band of sub-Saharan Africa, from the Xhosa iqhilika of South Africa to the honey beers of Central African forest communities.
- 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 at birth and namingCultural use · Local living practicePlacing honey on a newborn's lips or tongue is documented across many separate traditions. It is also unsafe, and this page states both facts rather than choosing between them.
- Lost-wax castingCultural use · Widespread living practiceModelling an object in wax, encasing it, melting the wax out and pouring metal into the space it leaves. One of the oldest metalworking techniques, still in use, and responsible for a large share of the world's surviving ancient bronze sculpture.
- Wax-resist dyeingCultural use · Widespread living practiceWax drawn or stamped onto cloth so that dye cannot reach it, then removed to leave a pattern. A living industrial demand for beeswax that almost no consumer connects to bees.