Historical
No longer practised. Known from documents, excavation or ethnography.
15 practices · whether it is still practised
- Bee bolesHive system · HistoricalRecessed alcoves built into garden and field walls to shelter skeps from rain and wind. Thousands survive across Britain and Ireland, and they are the only physical evidence of beekeeping in many places that left no documents at all.
- Zeidler forest beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · HistoricalForest beekeepers in medieval central Europe holding defined rights, obligations and in places their own jurisdiction. The clearest case anywhere of honey production organised as an institution rather than as a household activity.
- Telling the beesRitual and ceremony · HistoricalThe custom of informing a household's bees of a death, a birth or a marriage, and in some versions draping the hive in black or inviting the colony to the funeral. Recorded widely across northern Europe and the eastern United States in the nineteenth century.
- Honey in Roman cookingCultural use · HistoricalHoney as a routine kitchen ingredient in Roman cooking, used in savoury dishes as freely as in sweet ones, and documented in the largest surviving body of ancient recipes.
- Honey in ancient Greek food and drinkCultural use · HistoricalHoney in Greek eating and drinking: cakes for festivals and offerings, honey with cheese, honeyed wine, and a named regional honey treated as better than the rest.
- Honey in medieval European cookingCultural use · HistoricalHow European kitchens sweetened before cane sugar became affordable, what honey was used for, and the spiced honey cakes that outlived the era that produced them.
- Honey in funerary practiceCultural use · HistoricalHoney poured as a libation to the dead, placed in graves and used in funerary meals across several ancient traditions — kept firmly apart from the much weaker claims about preserving bodies.
- Honey and wax as tax, rent and tributeCultural use · HistoricalStates and landlords took honey and beeswax as payment across several continents and many centuries — which tells us what the products were worth better than any price list.
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney as a temple offering in a state that ran its own apiaries, the bee as a royal symbol, and the solar origin myth that is quoted far more confidently than its source supports.
- Honey offerings in Greek religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney poured to the dead and to the powers below, honey cakes as offerings, and the priestesses and prophetic figures Greek writers associated with bees.
- Wax writing tabletsCultural use · HistoricalA wooden frame filled with wax, written on with a stylus and smoothed flat to be used again — the erasable notebook of the classical and medieval world.
- Wax seals and sealingCultural use · HistoricalWax pressed with a matrix to authenticate a document or close a container — an authentication technology that worked because breaking it was obvious and forging it was hard.
- Bee omens and household customCultural use · HistoricalA body of recorded custom treating bees as household members whose behaviour carried meaning: swarms read as omens, bees never sold for money, and the hive kept informed of family events.
- Slavic and Baltic bee customsCultural use · HistoricalIn parts of eastern Europe and the Baltic, keeping bees together created a formal relationship between the keepers — a recorded kinship with obligations, and a word for it that still means friendship.
- 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.