Kritsky's book traces the history of human exploitation of honey bees, starting with the honey hunters' earliest forays into wild areas to look for swarms they could rob. Gradually humans learned that they could relocate bee swarms into logs, pipes or clay vessels placed closer to home.
"The earliest beekeepers were the ancient Egyptians," Kritsky said. "They had horizontal hives they made out of clay tubes. From there beekeeping moved up into the Mediterranean area where the Greeks and the Romans also used clay tubes or clay vessels laid on their sides."
"By A.D. 200 we had our first skeps," he said. "We had straw skeps by about A.D. 500."
The straw skep became the norm for more than a millennium, until humans discovered that a simple wooden box also would work, as long as it had an opening that the bees could use as an entrance. Some of the earliest box hives were octagonal, to mimic the shape of a hollow tree, but square wooden hive boxes soon prevailed. The moveable frame hive now in use was developed in 1851.
(See also, "Symposium Marks Milestones in Honey Bee Management, Research.")
Although it is a book of recipes, the introductory chapter of "Honey, I'm Homemade" also includes a brief natural history of honey, its chemical and health-enhancing properties and a description of how honey bees collect and process nectar into honey. The effort is astoundingly labor-intensive, Berenbaum writes.
"Whatever their species, individual flowers generally produce only tiny quantities of nectar, so up to 100,000 loads of nectar are required to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of honey," she writes. "One load of nectar, however, can require visiting at least a thousand individual
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| Contact: Diana Yates diya@illinois.edu 217-333-5802 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Source:Eurekalert |