Local living practice
Practised now, in a limited area or by a limited number of communities.
21 practices · whether it is still practised
- Eating broodCultural use · Local living practiceIn most harvesting traditions the larvae are food, and a nutritionally significant one. The modern picture of honey as a jar of clear liquid is a processing artefact; what a harvester carries home is comb containing honey, pollen, wax and brood.
- Mad honeyCultural use · Local living practiceHoney from rhododendron nectar carrying grayanotoxins, harvested deliberately in the Himalaya and the Black Sea region and used in small quantities. One of very few traditional claims about honey with a confirmed pharmacological mechanism, and a genuine poisoning hazard.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tikung boardsBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceShaped planks hung in seasonally flooded forest in West Kalimantan for giant honey bees to build on. The bees are entirely wild, the boards are owned and inherited, and the arrangement is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong deltaBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceAngled poles set in melaleuca forest in southern Vietnam, inviting giant honey bees to build where they can be worked. The same solution as tikung, arrived at in a different forest with a different tree.
- Sugarbag huntingStingless-bee keeping · Local living practiceAboriginal harvesting of native stingless bee nests across northern and eastern Australia. Finding the nest is the tradition as much as taking it, and the knowledge is embedded in story, song and seasonal indicators rather than held separately from them.
- 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.
- BalchéRitual and ceremony · Local living practiceA fermented drink of stingless bee honey and the bark of the balché tree, used ceremonially in the Maya lowlands. Suppressed under colonial rule, documented across several centuries, and still made.
- Fermented pot honeyCultural use · Local living practiceStingless bee honey ferments readily because it is wetter than Apis honey, and several traditions treat that as the point rather than as spoilage — deliberately aged, soured and drunk.
- Bashkir tree beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceCut cavities in living pines in the Burzyan forests of the southern Urals, worked with a dark forest bee and a climbing strap. One of very few tree-beekeeping traditions that did not lapse, and the practice the Polish revival drew on.
- Japanese box-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceStacked wooden boxes for Apis cerana japonica, harvested once a year by taking the top box. A minority practice alongside a much larger introduced Apis mellifera sector, sustained partly by a bee that can defend itself against giant hornets.
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceHollow-log and stone-cavity hives stacked in walls and moved between wadis to follow the sidr flowering, producing one of the most expensive honeys in world trade.
- Slovenian bee houses and painted panelsBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceStacked box hives in a purpose-built shed, with the front board of each hive painted with folk narrative, satire and religion. A folk art form that exists because of a hive design, and a beekeeping culture with unusual institutional continuity.
- Preserving food in honeyCultural use · Local living practiceFruit, nuts and occasionally meat stored in honey, in several unconnected traditions, for a reason that turns out to be sound chemistry rather than folklore.
- 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 at weddingsCultural use · Local living practiceHoney given to a couple at marriage in several traditions — and a careful look at the honeymoon story, which is repeated everywhere and supported by much less than it appears.
- 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.
- Beeswax candlesCultural use · Local living practiceThe largest single use of a bee product in European history: candles that burned clean enough for indoor use, made by a regulated trade, and demanded in quantity by the church.
- Bee venom in traditional practiceCultural use · Local living practiceDeliberate bee stings applied for arthritis and other conditions, in a documented tradition with a real pharmacology, a marketed modern form, and recorded deaths.