Did you know that about the history of Honeybees?
Exploring the connection between honeybees and warfare, mushrooms, and Cough Mixture!
Welcome back to Honeybee Histories. As long term readers will know I occasionally publish a slightly different essay on Substack which consists of a video and a number of historical facts (with explanations) about the history of honeybees. I’m making a slight change to these by making new versions that form mini ‘seasons’. Each post will contain three historical facts about bees with a video added to my Youtube channel. I haven’t quite decided on how many of these to produce each year, but it will probably be similar to the number that I’ve done previously (around 4-6).
The first ‘episode’ explores the following topics:
The use of honeybees as weapons in warfare
How fungi might offer honeybees medicinal cures
The use of honey in ancient Mesopotamia
Bees as a weapon in war!
Did you know that honeybees have been used in warfare since antiquity? The Romans used to drop hives of bees on invading armies and catapults were used in 16th century Europe to launch hives at enemy fortresses. More recently, beeswax has been used to coat ammunition.
Some claim that honeybee populations declined severely in the late Roman Empire due to their extensive use in war and the price of beeswax soared temporarily across the world during the Vietnam War, as the US government were purchasing most of it to coat their explosives!
For these claims I turn to Jake Kosek from Berkeley (California). In 2010, Kosek argued in an article entitled “Ecologies of Empire: On the new uses of the Honeybee”, that there were a wide range of military applications for honeybees being used or investigated in modern warfare. In doing so, Kosek offered up a bit of history about the use of bees in war, starting with examples from antiquity such as hives full of bees being dropped on invading armies by the Roman army and catapulted into enemy fortresses in the sixteenth century.
At least from World War I onwards, beeswax was used to coat ammunition. It had been found to be the perfect medium to use as a water/damp inhibitor for both high explosives and small arms ammunition. Indeed, in a separate study by Michael Badger we learn that the price of beeswax temporarily rose to unbelievable levels during the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The reason for this was simply because the US government attempted to purchase every tonne of beeswax available on the world market to support their war effort.
Sources: Badger, Michael, Heather Honey: A Comprehensive Guide (BeeCraft: York, 2016), pp. 60-61.
Kosek, Jake, ‘Ecologies of Empire: On the new uses of the Honeybee’, Cultural Anthropology, 25:4 (2010), pp. 650-678.
Honeybees and mycelium
Did you know that honeybees sometimes forage on mushrooms and mycelium to obtain medicinal and nutritional value from them? Not only does this prove that honeybees know how to self-medicate, but it has also been useful in combating modern viruses such as deformed wing virus and Lake Sinai virus.
The October 2018 issue of the Nature magazine included an article demonstrating that mushroom mycelia could reduce virus susceptibility in honeybees. The article by fungi expert Paul E. Stamets and others, argued that honeybees have been observed foraging on mushroom mycelium and that they appear to derive medicinal and nutritional value from them. As Stamets et al. argue,
“This behaviour may represent a novel facet of social immunity, given that a growing body of evidence indicates that honey bees self-medicate using plant-derived substances.”
The experiment involved giving honeybees mycelial extracts in sucrose syrup and the results suggested a reduction in deformed wing virus and Lake Sinai virus.
Source: Stamets, Paul E., et al., ‘Extracts of Polypore Mushroom Mycelia Reduce Viruses in Honey Bees’, Nature, 8:13936 (2018), pp. 1-6. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-32194-8
The use of honey in Mesopotamia
While the ancient Mesopotamian’s generally preferred date juice to sweeten their foods, they did also use honey. One popular dish contained a mixture of flour, milk, and honey. Sometimes, honey was used for medicinal purposes (a cough mixture was devised made of beer, herbs, and honey) and other times it formed part of religious ceremonies.
Recently, I have been writing about early beekeeping practices in some of my paid subscriber essays. Last month I discussed beekeeping in ancient Egypt but I didn’t touch on Mesopotamia, which is also rich in early beekeeping evidence. To partly put this right I have been looking at an article entitled “Bees, Honey and Health in Antiquity”, by L. Cilliers and F.P. Retief. This article includes a section on Mesopotamia in which it is stated that syrup of dates were preferred over honey as a food sweetener. Therefore, the word dispu could refer to date juice or honey interchangeably (making it difficult to know which is being talked about in the sources).
Whilst date juice was the preference, this did not mean that honey wasn’t used. It was sometimes used in medicines and Ashurbanipal’s library mentions a cough mixture made of beer, herbs and honey. Another recipe for cleaning yellow teeth also featured beer, oil and honey.
It was also used for religious ceremonies with butter and formed a popular dish made of a mixture of flour, milk and honey.
Source: Cilliers, L., and F.P. Retief, ‘Bees, Honey and Health in Antiquity’, Akroterion, 53 (2008), pp. 7-19.