Bee-keeping

When the Sun weeps a second time, and lets fall water from his eyes, it is changed into working bees; they work in the flowers of each kind, and honey and wax are produced instead of water.

pSalt 825, first millennium BCE ^[29]

    The first official mention recognizing the importance of honey dates from the first dynasty, when the title of "Sealer of the Honey" is given ^[11]; the oldest pictures of bee-keepers in action are from the Old Kingdom: in Niuserre’s sun temple bee-keepers are shown blowing smoke into hives as they are removing the honey-combs. After extracting the honey from the combs it was strained and poured into earthen jars which were then sealed. Honey treated in this manner could be kept years. From the New Kingdom on mentions of honey become more frequent ^[8], but only four depictions of honey production and no actual hives have been found. ^[15]

Sedge and bee, symbolizing respectively Upper and Lower Egypt
© Kenneth J. Stein ^[17]

    The main centre of bee-keeping was Lower Egypt with its extensive irrigated lands full of flowering plants, where the bee was chosen as a symbol for the country. Since earliest times one of the pharaohs’ titles was Bee King,^[32] and the gods also were associated with the bee. The sanctuary in which Osiris was worshipped, was the Hwt bjt ^[7], the Mansion of the Bee.

    The Egyptians had a steady honey supply from their domesticated bees, but they seem to have valued wild honey even more. Honey hunters, often protected by royal archers, would scour the wild wadis for bee colonies.

I appointed for thee archers and collectors of honey, bearing incense to deliver their yearly impost into thy august treasury.

Papyrus Harris, donation to the temple of Re at Heliopolis, New Kingdom ^[28]

Keeping the bees

The hives

    In a 4th century BCE papyrus containing the Myth of the Eye of Re the hives are described as follows:

One does not build a royal palace for the honey bee. A hive of dung is better than a hive of stone [like a barn]…The house of the bee is effectively an arrangement of combs, a place suitable for storing honey…It is more pleasant for the bees beneath the honey combs.

Myth of the Eye of Re, Leiden Cat, I 384 ^[32]

    Bee-keeping methods are conservative in this region, well adapted to local conditions, for instance the kind of hives depicted in the reliefs of Rekhmire, apparently made of unbaked clay ^[20] or possibly woven baskets or mattings covered with mud, have been used in Egypt ^[18] to this day.^[20]

Tomb of Pabasa (25th dynasty)
Photo courtesy Kenneth Stein.^[17]

    Cylindrical hives like the ones in the picture on the left from the tomb of Pabasa, dated to the 7th century BCE, were made of clay and stacked horizontally on top of each other ^[12] in rows up to eight high, a total of up to 500 hives, wall apiaries with the hives on the outside left empty at times as insulation against the heat. ^[16] Combs in horizontal hives are smaller but more numerous than those in upright ones. This makes honey being stored and bee larvae being raised in the same comb less likely,^[22] making harvesting easier.
    The bees were possibly induced into building their combs across the hive, for easier removal of the honey and division of the colony at swarming time. Swarming had best be prevented as one might lose a large part of the bees. Crane suggests that short reed pipes may have been used to call the young queens still in their cells. listening for their reply, separating them from the rest of the swarm and installing them in a hive of their own.^[32]

Itineracy

    When there were few blossoming flowers, the hives were probably kept close to home to prevent theft and moved close to the sources of nectar during the flowering season.Thus, in the year 256 BCE a beehive owner named Senchons wanted her donkey returned to her, so that she could move her hives into the pastures.^[10] Sometimes the hives had to be transported to higher lying land, to prevent them from being destroyed in the annual Nile inundation, as the so-called bee-keepers’ petition dating from the middle of the third century BCE shows:

To Zeno greeting from the beekeepers of the Arsinoite nome.
You wrote about the donkeys, that they were to come to Philadelphia and work ten days. But it is now eighteen days that they have been working and the hives have been kept in the fields, and it is time to bring them home and we have no donkeys to carry them back. Now it is no small impost that we pay the king. Unless the donkeys are sent at once, the result will be that the hives will be ruined and the impost lost. Already the peasants are warning us, saying: "We are going to release the water and burn the brushwood, so unless you remove them you will lose them." We beg you then, if it please you, to send us our donkeys, in order that we may remove them. And after removing them we will come back with the donkeys when you need them.
May you prosper!

Bee-keepers’ petition, Ptolemaic period ^[35]

    There may have been itinerant apiarists living by the Nile who loaded their hives onto boats, shipped them upriver in autumn or early spring, and then followed the flowering of the plants northwards, as they were reported to do in the 18th century CE ^[19], but there is no evidence for it.

Beekepers’ protective measures

    Ancient Egyptian bees may well have been more agressive than the placid Italian bee, which has become the the dominant variety in modern times. Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head of the library at Alexandria around 200 BCE, claimed, that the beekeepers approached the hives with shaven heads, as the bees reacted very violently to the smell of perfumed oil applied to the hair.^[14] Apiarists are never shown using protective gear and relied on smoke blown into the hives to keep the bees peaceful.

Harvesting

    Little is known about how the honey was harvested. According to the tomb depictions in TT279 the hives were opened from the back, smoke was blown into the hives and the bees escaped through the hive entrance in the front. Anything else about the process in ancient times is conjecture, based on how honey has traditionally been harvested in Egypt:

The standing bee-keeper produces smoke, while the one kneeling removes the combs from the back of the clay hive after breaking the mud sealing.
(Picture in the tomb of Rekhmire, 18th dynasty
After a photograph from Abd el Wahab, The apiculture in Egypt, 2008)

    Harvesting generally takes place twice a year, in spring and in late autumn. The combs are gathered in a cow skin, then they are crushed by treading on them and the honey let flow out through a small hole in the skin into containers. What was left in the skin was put into a bowl and the remaining honey washed out with a small amount of water, passed through a sieve made of blades of grass thus removing impurities.^[20]
    The wax is rendered by heating, nowadays done in a water bath to prevent it from catching fire. Impurities floating on the surface of the liquid wax can be scooped off, then it is possibly strained and put into a bag press. It has been estimated that for every kilo of honey somwhat more than sixty grammes of wax can be won.^[21]

Honey

    Temples kept bees in order to satisfy the desire of the gods for honey and for the production of medicines and ointments. But demand far outran local production. Honey, like many other luxury goods was imported from Djahi, Retenu ^[3] and possibly even further afield. Canaan, for instance, was called Land of Milk and Honey in the Hebrew tradition, and the probably fictitious Sinuhe waxed lyrical about the riches of Yaa, an unidentified Asiatic region:

It was a good land called Yaa. Figs were in it and grapes. It had more wine than water. Abundant was its honey, plentiful its oil. All kinds of fruit were on its trees. Barley was there and emmer, and no end of cattle of all kinds.

The Tale of Sinuhe, Middle Kingdom ^[30]

Apiarist pouring honey, possibly straining it
Tomb of Pabasa (25th dynasty)
Photo courtesy Kenneth Stein.^[17]

    Honey was used for sweetening, as sugar was unknown in antiquity ^[9]. It was part of the diet of the well-to-do, one of one’s - using the words of the courtier Ineni - necessities:

I was supplied from the table of the king with bread of oblations for the king, beer likewise, meat, fat-meat, vegetables, various fruit, honey, cakes, wine, oil. My necessities were apportioned in life and health, as his majesty himself said, for love of me.

Tomb of Ineni, reign of Thutmose II ^[31]

    Honey was too expensive for peasants and servants, yet underlings found opportunities to enjoy it as well, even if the consequence was that the back would have to pay for the pleasures of the belly. A scribe wrote to his master at Lahun a letter containing the following passage:

As concerns this hin (about half a litre) of honey which had been given for this here servant (i.e. the writer) - this servant discovered that this Asiatic had drunk it, giving this here servant (i.e. the writer) the answer which follows: "Behold, it was the sweetness which has seduced me to do it."

pUC 32124, Middle Kingdom ^[23]

    The gods - and their priesthood - had a sweet tooth too ^[13]. Thutmose III’s div