Source:Head:A Brief Survey of Ancient Near Eastern Beekeeping:FR 20:1:Nomadic Beekeeping

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Head: "Both the ancient world and contemporary traditional apiculture elicit some evidence for nomadic beekeeping"

Parent page: Book of Mormon/Animals/Bees

Head: "Both the ancient world and contemporary traditional apiculture elicit some evidence for nomadic beekeeping"

Ronan James Head: [1]

Both the ancient world and contemporary traditional apiculture elicit some evidence for nomadic beekeeping, what the Germans call Wanderbienenzucht. Ancient hives (and modern Near Eastern peasant hives) were most often shaped like pipes or logs (where bees naturally swarm) and were made from pottery, wicker, mud, clay, and wood. All of these hives would be portable on pack animals and boats. Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) describes the moving of hives along the River Po:

When food for bees is lacking in the immediate neighbourhood, the inhabitants put their hives in boats and take them by night five miles upstream. The bees emerge at dawn, feed and return every day to the boats. They change the position of the boats until they sink low in the water under the weight and it is realised that the hives are full. Then the boats are brought back and the honey harvested. [2]

Writing in 1740, a French traveler described migratory beekeeping in Egypt: at the end of October (the end of the flowering season in Upper Egypt), the hives were placed on boats and floated down the Nile. At places where plants were still in flower, the boats were halted and the bees allowed to forage. [3]

Notes

  1. Roman James Head, "A Brief Survey of Ancient Near Eastern Beekeeping," FARMS Review 20/1 (2008): 57–66. off-site wiki
  2. Natural History XXI.43.75.
  3. Eva Crane, Archaeology of Beekeeping, 42