Practised, declining
Still practised and measurably contracting — fewer practitioners, less territory, or a shorter season than the earlier record describes.
21 practices · whether it is still practised
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Clay and pottery hivesHive system · Practised, decliningHorizontal cylinders of fired or unfired clay, stacked in rows and worked from the rear. The best-evidenced ancient hive on earth, for one reason: it is the only material that survives, so the archaeological record of hives is really the record of this design.
- Wall hivesHive system · Practised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
- Cork hivesHive system · Practised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
- Collective apiariesHive system · Practised, decliningPurpose-built shared structures holding hundreds of family-owned hives, with allocation, maintenance and guarding organised communally. Documented in the Maghreb, southern Arabia and central Europe, and among the most striking pieces of beekeeping architecture anywhere.
- Maya meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningKeeping Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives across the Yucatán peninsula: a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own ceremonies and its own colonial tribute record, now reduced to a fraction of the colonies recorded two generations ago.
- The jobónHive system · Practised, decliningA hollowed log section closed with discs at both ends, stacked horizontally on racks under a shelter. The hive of Maya meliponiculture, and a design that solves the specific problem of harvesting a nest built in pots rather than in comb.
- 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.
- 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.
- Korean mountain beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningKeeping the native Asian honey bee in log and plank hives in the mountain villages of Korea, harvested once a year in autumn. A tradition defined by a bee that resists intensive management and by the forest it depends on.