The buzz about honey and the humble bee

One of the quintessential customs at Rosh Hashanah is to eat apples dipped in honey for a sweet, well-rounded new year. How did what my high school science teacher indelicately termed “bees’ vomit” get onto our tables? The history of honey drips with interesting facts and anecdotes.

Bees have been producing honey from the pollination of flowers for about 40 million years. The first indications of human beings gathering honey is from Valencia, Spain, in Cuevas de la Araña. Here, cave paintings that are at least 8 000 years old show people foraging for wild honey. The humans are shown carrying gourds or baskets, and reaching the bees’ nest with ladders and ropes. Prehistoric humanoid creatures probably followed birds like the greater honeyguide to wild beehives.

When constructing a pipeline in Georgia from Baku to Ceyhan, archaeologists unearthed the oldest honey remains in the world. Inside clay vessels in an ancient tomb, they found fossilised honey that was between 4 700 and 5 500 years old. Ancient Georgians would bury the dead with honey for their journey to the afterlife, as would the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

The first written records of beekeeping – rather than just harvesting wild honey – originate from ancient Egypt from about 3 500 BCE. There, honey was used as a sweetener for foods and for mixing the pigment used to create hieroglyphs. The Egyptians kept bees at their temples to produce honey for offerings, mummification, and consumption. Beekeeping was big business in Egypt, practised by all strata of society. Special rafts were constructed to transport beehives along the Nile to get close to seasonal flowering plants so the bees could pollinate them. Besides being eaten, honey was used by ancient Egyptian doctors to heal wounds. At times, honey was so valuable in Egypt, it was used as currency. Marriage vows included a husband’s promise to provide his new wife with honey.

Honey was also produced in ancient Greece. In 594 BCE, a law was passed about beekeeping: “He who sets up hives of bees must put them 300 feet [90 metres] away from those already installed by another.” The promulgation of a law always suggests a widespread practice that it is trying to regulate. Beekeepers in the Hellenistic period would move their hives to far-flung places to coincide with the growing cycles of vegetation to yield more frequent harvests, as the ancient Egyptians did on the River Nile.

According to Greek myth, Melissa, the daughter of the king of Crete, fed Zeus with the honey of the bee Panacride. In 400 BCE, Persian generals defeated invading Greeks by feeding bees toxic rhododendron flowers, which poisoned the Greek army’s honey. When Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, his body was transported more than 2 800 km from Babylon to Macedonia, submerged in a vat of honey.

The Tanach, too, has many mentions of honey. In the Book of Judges, Samson found honey and a swarm of bees in a lion’s carcass. Leviticus says, “Every grain offering you bring to the Lord must be made without yeast, for you are not to burn any yeast or honey in a food offering presented to the Lord.” The Book of Proverbs says, “Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”

Eretz Yisrael is described in the Book of Exodus as a “land flowing with milk and honey”. Several commentators, however, believe that the original biblical word devash (translated as “honey”) is actually a reference to sweet date syrup rather than bees’ honey.

An archaeological dig in Tel Rehov in Israel in 2005 found an apiary from the 10th century BCE with 100 hives. It would have probably produced half a ton of honey each year.

Honey is considered kosher even though it’s produced by a non-kosher creature – a flying insect. It’s the only such exception in kashrut. The Talmud deems it kosher as it’s not an actual secretion of the bee; the bee functions only as a carrier and facilitator as its enzymes transform nectar into honey. It’s not digested by the bee, and is thus deemed kosher in its raw form. Packaged honey would need a kosher certification mark on its label.

The spiritual and healing properties of honey are also celebrated in Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.

In the Middle Ages, the main beekeepers were monasteries, using beeswax for candles to provide light for huge cathedrals. Beeswax burns cleaner than animal fat. Only in 1900 did the Pope permit churches to burn non-beeswax candles. Monks produced mead (fermented honey) as an alcoholic drink.

Honey was the main sweetener in the West until supplanted by the cane sugar that originated in southeast Asia, which became available and affordable from the 1850s. The flavour and colour of honey varies according to which flower-nectar it comes from and the region where these flowers grow.

Today, bee populations worldwide are threatened with colony collapse disorder in which worker bees disappear due to pesticides, destruction of habitat, and other poisons. Much of nature and therefore life depends on bees, and important efforts are being made to prevent this collapse. So, spare a thought for the humble bee this Rosh Hashanah.