Category Global Beekeeping Traditions

Beekeeping and honey-hunting traditions from around the world, past and present, including stingless bee keeping, folklore, and practices distinct from mainstream Langstroth-hive beekeeping. Long before the movable frame, people kept bees in hollow logs, cork bark, clay cylinders, woven skeps and living trees, and many are still in use because they suit local bees and forests better than a standardized box.

The articles group naturally. Honey hunting covers the Gurung cliff harvests in Nepal, the Kadar and Irula of the Western Ghats, the Sundarbans harvesters in tiger country, and the rock painting at Cuevas de la Araña. Tree beekeeping covers bartnictwo in Poland and bortnichestvo in Russia, with nest cavities cut into living pines. Stingless bee keeping covers Maya meliponiculture and the sugarbag bees of Australia, harvested from pots rather than combs. Regional traditions include the native Japanese bee, Yemen and its Sidr honey, Ethiopia, Iceland, Mount Athos and the log gums of Appalachia. Folklore rounds it out: the Barberini bees, the Manchester bee, telling the bees, and honey in world religions.

It is for readers who want to see how differently beekeeping can be done, and for beekeepers who suspect, correctly, that a Kenyan beehive fence or a Slovenian painted hive panel has something to teach them.

Start here:

• Meliponiculture: The Maya Tradition of Keeping Stingless Bees — honey without a sting or a frame
• Gurung Honey Hunters of Nepal: The Cliff-Face Tradition Behind Mad Honey — rope-ladder harvests on Himalayan cliffs
• Bartnictwo: Poland’s UNESCO-Listed Tree Beekeeping Tradition — living-tree hives and the craft being revived
• Traditional Japanese Beekeeping and the Nihonmitsubachi — the native Japanese bee and its own hive style
• Beehive Fences: How Kenyan Farmers Use Bees to Stop Elephants — a modern tradition with a conservation purpose