Beekeeping | Dickinson College Commentaries

Unlike our ancestors, few people today are farmers, and a majority are city-dwellers. In the same way that our farming forebears just “knew” information about cows or growing potatoes from proximity, if not actual experience, so too was information about honeybees likely more widely known in the past than today. What follows is a brief tutorial, in no way comprehensive. Rather, it should help orient the reader and provide some basic information, which may make reading and understanding Georgics 4 more intelligible and enjoyable.

“Bees” covers a large range of insects belonging to the scientific class Hymenoptera (along with ants and wasps). Though we likely imagine creatures with yellow and black striped bodies, bees appear in a wide array of colors and sizes (from tiny green bees [family Halictidae] to big, fat shiny black carpenter bees {genus Xylocopa]). Most bees are wild creatures, native to a specific region, and many are solitary (that is, not living in communities). Yet, when authors or farmers—or, indeed, Roman writers like Vergil—write about the lives and habits of bees, they almost always refer to a single species, Apis mellifera, the European honeybee.

While we would be wrong to think of the honeybee as a tamed species, it has been kept as livestock by humans for millennia. Our earliest evidence comes from Egypt, where a relief sculpture in a temple, built around 2600 BCE, shows people harvesting honey: smoking hives to quiet the bees, pressing honeycomb, and filling jars with honey (Ransome 26). Honeybees are social animals and live together in hives, within communities that are highly structured. Ancient natural scientists and agricultural writers keenly viewed the natural world, and thus understood much about the lives of these bees, yet they also understandably misinterpreted aspects of their lives, due to particular aspects of honeybee life that are hard to observe.

Aristotle offers a comprehensive account of honeybees (HA 5.21-22), detailing their anatomy and habits. As one of the earliest writers of natural history, he is a source for many subsequent authors. Agriculturalists, such as Varro (RR 3.16) and Columella (Col. 9) are naturally more interested in the practicalities of beekeeping, and as such devote considerable time to other topics, such as where to place a hive, how to keep it healthy, how to treat for diseases, how to discourage predators, and when and how to harvest honey. Details from both Aristotle and Varro appear in the Georgics; it is likely that Vergil knew both—and other similar—works well, or was familiar with both honeybee lore and expertise that might have been considered common knowledge by many at that time.

The notes in this commentary detail many places where these ancient authors demonstrate their detailed understanding of honeybee societies, but it is perhaps worth mentioning that a casual observer would not infer this information from a chance glance at a bee. The ancients communicate practical information that modern-day novice beekeepers are told to keep in mind when starting to keep hives: the importance of a water source nearby, containing multiple places where the bees can alight; the benefit of numerous types of forage in the area, including specific plants like linden and thyme, which bees are especially partial to; the need to elevate hives, so that they remain out of the reach of smaller predators; and an awareness of the most common sorts of pests and how to manage them, among other similarly important details. Ancient writers had also observed hive behavior carefully enough to differentiate the three types of honeybees: drones, worker bees, and what the ancients called the “king” bee. Likewise, they understood that groups of bees practiced specialized skills, such as nursing the young, cleaning the hive, making wax and repairing the hive, defending it against foes, and foraging for pollen.

In addition, ancient writers richly describe the hive itself and its workings. They knew that bees search out likely locations for a hive (for example, in a hollow tree or crevice in rocks). They then build wax honeycomb, which they use to store honey as well as nurture eggs into new bees. Farmers often built containers to contain a hive—either of wood, ceramic, or straw, which allowed the farmer to manage the hive, to control its size and to move the bees, if necessary. Vergil presents beekeeping as critical a skill as caring for sheep and oxen or tending grapevines, which may strike today’s reader as unusual. It’s helpful to remember just how prized honey was: it the only sweetener (other than fruit products) available to the Romans. As a result, it was certainly worth a farmer’s effort to maintain thriving hives.

Other aspects of honeybee life are much harder to discern with the naked eye or from prolonged observation; as a result, it is no surprise that ancient writers did not fully understand them. Most notably, what the ancients designated as the “king” bee, we now know to be a queen. A hive chooses when to raise a queen, who upon emergence from her cell, departs on a mating flight(s). Queens are inseminated by drones, and they often mate at 10 or more feet up in the air, which made it incredibly difficult for premodern people to view. In fact, the understanding that the largest bee and “leader” of any hive is a queen was not realized until the 17th century. Queens return from their mating flight(s) now able to lay fertilized eggs for years (indeed, the queen is the longest-lived of all bees in a hive, with a lifespan typically of two to seven years). Because a queen is large and each hive has only one, it perhaps seemed logical to Mediterranean patriarchal king-based cultures that the large and unique bee in any hive must be a male king, but it was an error that led to further misunderstandings for centuries, including the role of drones, and the way that eggs are laid.

While it is the habit of 21st century writers to extol our own scientific progress and mock the scientific errors of previous ages, this is perhaps not the wisest course, if for no other reason than that the knowledge of ancients—in particular on the practicalities of beekeeping—was in many regards sound and offers instruction consonant with many contemporary beekeeping practices.

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