Revived
Lapsed and deliberately restarted. Not the same thing as continuous practice, and the difference is recorded rather than smoothed over.
6 practices · whether it is still practised
- Straw skepsHive system · RevivedA dome of coiled straw bound with split bramble, the standard European hive for centuries and the reason the beehive symbol looks the way it does. It ended not because it stopped working but because it could not be inspected for disease.
- MeliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · RevivedKeeping stingless bees for honey, wax-resin and pollination, in log sections, clay pots or purpose-built boxes. Practised independently across the Neotropics, Australia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, and constrained everywhere by the same biological limit.
- The decline of Yucatán meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · RevivedOne of the few cases anywhere in which the ending of a cultural practice has been measured rather than described. Colony counts across the Yucatán peninsula, repeated decades apart, document a steep fall — and give the reasons.
- Tree beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · RevivedCavities cut into living pines high above the ground, worked from a climbing rope, with the colony otherwise left to itself. The largest beekeeping system of medieval eastern and central Europe, lapsed almost entirely in the twentieth century and deliberately restarted in the last two decades.
- Mead makingCultural use · RevivedFermenting honey and water into alcohol — the simplest possible fermented drink, made across much of Europe and beyond, revived commercially in the last few decades.
- Encaustic paintingCultural use · RevivedPigment bound in hot beeswax and worked onto a surface. The technique behind the Fayum mummy portraits, which look startlingly present two thousand years on because wax does not yellow or crack the way oil does.