Magical Busy Bees

By | HOP SING GRASSHOPPER | Somewhere in the warm air above a meadow, a magical busy bee worker is doing her job that would exhaust a marathon runner. She leaves the hive, scans the landscape for color and scent, lands on a blossom, and draws up a droplet of nectar thinner than a raindrop. Then she does it again, and again, perhaps a hundred times before she heads home. Over her entire life of a few busy summer weeks, she will produce about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. It is a humbling statistic, and it is the right place to begin, because nearly everything about the honey bee is a lesson in how tiny contributions, multiplied by tens of thousands, can shape a world.The story of that world stretches back much further than most people imagine. Bees descended from predatory wasps more than a hundred million years ago, around the time flowering plants began to spread across the planet. Somewhere along the way, a wasp-like ancestor stopped hunting insects to feed its young and started feeding them pollen instead. That small dietary shift set off one of the great partnerships in evolutionary history. Flowers grew brighter, sweeter, and more fragrant to attract bees, and bees grew furrier, more efficient, and more devoted to flowers. The true honey bees, the genus Apis, appeared tens of millions of years ago, and fossils of bees preserved in amber and shale show a creature that would look quite familiar to anyone who has watched a clover patch on a summer afternoon. Long before anyone kept bees, people robbed them. In the Cuevas de la Araña, the Spider Caves near Valencia, Spain, a rock painting thought to be around eight thousand years old shows a figure dangling from vines or ropes beside what appears to be a wild hive, with tiny bees swirling around. It is one of the oldest images we have of a human being doing something dangerous for the sake of something sweet. Similar scenes appear in rock art across Africa, India, and Australia. For most of human prehistory, honey was a prize taken from the wild by brave, stung, and presumably very motivated ancient folk.

The shift from raiding to keeping happened gradually, and the Egyptians were among the first to do it with real sophistication. By about 2400 BCE, reliefs in a sun temple near Cairo show workers blowing smoke into hives, harvesting combs, and sealing honey into jars. Egyptian beekeepers used long clay cylinders stacked like firewood and even floated hives on boats down the Nile, following the bloom of flowers as the season moved from south to north. This was migratory beekeeping, a practice that still thrives today, invented thousands of years before the internal combustion engine. Honey flowed through Egyptian life as food, medicine, and offering. Jars of it were left in tombs, including the burial chambers of the pharaohs, and the old story that edible honey has been discovered in such tombs is repeated so often because it fits what we know about honey’s astonishing shelf life. The archaeological record offers an even more striking window into the ancient trade. At Tel Rehov in northern Israel, excavators uncovered an apiary dating to roughly 900 BCE, with the remains of about thirty hives made of straw and unbaked clay, arranged in tidy rows. It was an industrial-scale operation for its time, and it suggests that beekeeping was a respected business in the Iron Age Near East. The Greeks and Romans carried the craft forward with real reverence. Aristotle studied bees with the curiosity of a naturalist, even if he got a few things wrong (he believed the colony’s leader was a king). Virgil devoted an entire book of his Georgics to the bees, praising their discipline and devotion to the common good. To the ancient mind, the hive was a model society, and the beekeeper was something between a farmer and a priest. Through the medieval period, beekeeping in Europe was centered on the skep, the familiar dome-shaped basket of coiled straw that appears in so many old illustrations. Skeps were charming and cheap, but they had a grim flaw. Because the comb was built in a tangled mass inside the basket, there was no way to take the honey without destroying the colony, so many beekeepers simply sulfured or drowned the bees at the end of the season. This process was not economical, the beekeepers had to start over every year to repopulate their hives.

It was a harvest that cost the farmer his workforce every year. Even so, the demand for what bees made was enormous. Honey was the main sweetener in Europe for centuries, since cane sugar was a costly import. Beeswax was nearly as valuable as honey, because it burned cleanly and brightly, and the candles of cathedrals and monasteries depended on it. Monasteries kept apiaries for exactly this reason. Honey also became mead, the fermented drink that appears in everything from Norse sagas to Beowulf and may be one of the oldest alcoholic beverages in human history. A good beekeeper in the Middle Ages was producing food, light, medicine, and a party in a jar. When English colonists crossed the Atlantic, they brought bees along. Honey bees were not native to the Americas, and the first colonies arrived in Virginia in the 1620s. They spread westward faster than the settlers did, and Native peoples reportedly learned to read the arrival of these strange new insects as a warning, calling them the “white man’s fly.” Bees escaped into the wilds, set up in hollow trees, and became part of the landscape of a continent that had never known them.The great revolution in beekeeping came in 1851, and it came from a Philadelphia clergyman named Lorenzo Langstroth. Langstroth noticed something that bees had been quietly demonstrating for millennia: they leave a gap of roughly three-eighths of an inch between surfaces they want to keep open for traffic. If a space is smaller than that, they seal it with a sticky resin called propolis. If it is larger, they fill it with comb. But at that precise distance, which came to be called the bee space, they leave things alone. Langstroth designed a hive with movable wooden frames spaced to honor the bee space, so that each frame of comb could be lifted out without being glued in place or torn apart. It was a deceptively simple idea that changed everything. Beekeepers could now inspect their colonies, move combs, add boxes, and harvest honey without killing the bees. Simple solutions for simple problems are the most and best way to manage bees.

The invention of the centrifugal honey extractor in 1865 let them spin honey out of the comb and return the empty wax frames intact, saving the bees weeks of rebuilding work. Commercial beekeeping, as we know it, was born. The twentieth century added trucks, plastic, queen-rearing techniques, and a continent-spanning pollination industry. Today, beekeepers load thousands of hives onto flatbed trucks and drive them hundreds or thousands of miles to wherever a crop is blooming. Every February, a staggering number of colonies, well over a million, converge on California’s almond orchards, making it one of the largest managed pollination events on Earth. Honey, once the whole point of the enterprise, has in many cases become a pleasant side income to the more lucrative business of renting bees to farmers. Honey is a marvel of food engineering done without any engineering at all. Foragers collect nectar, which is mostly water with a small amount of sugar, and pass it to house bees inside the hive. These bees add enzymes, chiefly one called invertase, which breaks the complex sugar sucrose into the simpler sugars glucose and fructose. Then they spread the nectar in thin layers across the comb and fan it with their wings, evaporating the water until it falls from roughly eighty percent to about seventeen or eighteen percent. Finally they cap the cell with wax. The result is something few microbes can survive. The sugar concentration is so high that it draws water out of bacteria and yeast, killing or paralyzing them. The enzymes also produce small amounts of gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which add acidity and mild antimicrobial power. This is why honey can sit in a jar for years without spoiling, and why people have reached for it as a wound dressing since antiquity. Modern medicine still uses specially prepared medical-grade honey in some wound care, a case where ancient wisdom and modern clinical practice shake hands. The antibacterial compotent in honey is a perfect addition to modern day medicine similar to leaches and maggots for wounds.

If you walk down the sweetener aisle of any grocery store today, honey is surrounded by rivals. White sugar, brown sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, agave nectar, maple syrup, stevia, monk fruit, sucralose, and a dozen other products all compete for a place in your coffee. Honey holds its own for several reasons, and loses ground for others. Its strengths begin with flavor. A single teaspoon of honey can taste of orange blossoms, wild thyme, buckwheat, or clover, depending on where the bees were foraging. No refined sweetener can claim that kind of range. Honey is also a little sweeter than sugar by weight, so a cook can use somewhat less of it, though honey does carry more calories per tablespoon than table sugar because it is denser. It has a modestly lower glycemic index than sucrose, meaning it raises blood sugar a bit more slowly, although it is still a sugar and should be treated as one. It contains trace amounts of minerals, antioxidants, and plant compounds that refined sugar lacks, but the amounts are small, and nobody should think of honey as a health food in the way they would think of vegetables. It also has a story, a farm, and a beekeeper behind it, which matters to a growing number of shoppers. The weaknesses are mostly economic. Honey is expensive to produce, because it depends on the labor of living insects and the whims of weather. Cane and beet sugar, and corn syrup in particular, can be made in huge factories at a fraction of the cost. For the food industry, the choice is nearly always the cheaper sweetener, which is why honey tends to appear on the label of boutique products while corn syrup quietly fills the cereal aisle. Honey has also faced a problem with fraud. Because it is valuable and hard to test, some imported honey has been found to be diluted with cheaper syrups, which hurts honest beekeepers who cannot match the artificially low prices. Meanwhile, the zero-calorie sweeteners appeal to people who want sweetness without sugar’s calories, a market honey was never going to win. In many cases people return to natural honey for a healthy life.