Before a honeybee ever unfurls its proboscis to drink, it has often already tasted what it landed on – through its feet. Honeybees carry contact chemoreceptors on their tarsi, the terminal leg segments that touch down first on a flower,…
Few insects have carried as much symbolic weight across as many unrelated cultures as the honeybee. From ancient Greek priestesses who took their very name from bees, to a Pope who filled his family chapel with them, to an emperor…
In rural England, Germany, Wales, and later New England, families kept a custom that sounds almost like superstition today but was, for centuries, treated as a genuine household obligation: when someone in the family died, a member of the household…
China has one of the longest continuously documented beekeeping histories in the world, and today it is also the world’s largest honey producer by volume – a genuinely striking combination of ancient tradition and modern industrial scale that few other…
In the tropical and subtropical woodlands of northern Australia, Aboriginal Australians have gathered “sugarbag” – the honey and nest contents of native stingless bees – for an extraordinarily long span of time, in a tradition widely regarded among the oldest…
Deep in the pine and linden forests of the southern Ural mountains, in Russia’s Bashkortostan region, beekeepers still climb living trees using a leather climbing belt and spiked hand tools to harvest honey from wild bee colonies nesting in hand-carved…
Ethiopia is Africa’s largest honey producer, and by a wide margin – a fact that surprises many people unfamiliar with just how deep and continuous the country’s beekeeping tradition actually runs. Long before European colonial contact, before the Langstroth hive…
Twice a year, in the foothills of central Nepal, men from Gurung communities climb hand-woven bamboo and rope ladders hundreds of feet up sheer cliff faces to harvest honey from the world’s largest honey bee, Apis laboriosa. It is one…
Long before a Spanish ship ever reached the Yucatan coast, the Maya were already sophisticated beekeepers – just not of the honeybee most of us picture. Their bee was Melipona beecheii, called Xunan Kaab (“Royal Lady Bee”) in Yucatec Maya,…