Honey : History | Traditional Use | Facts

It's impossible to know just how long honey has been in life, as it's been about as far ago as we can recall. Cave drawings in Spain from 7000 BC reveal the oldest signs of apiculture, but the remains of honey bees date back just 150 million years! Magic properties and versatility have provided honey with a significant part of its past.

Human use of honey is dated back to around 8000 years ago, as shown in drawings from the Stone Age. Former Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, Greeks, and Romans used honey for wounds and intestinal diseases.

The early recorded use of honey corresponds at least to the Upper Palaeolithic, around 25,000 years ago. The dangerous task of extracting honey from wild bees was achieved at the period, as it is today, by utilizing a range of methods, including smoking hives, to mitigate the reaction of guard bees.

Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings from Spain, India, Australia and Southern Africa is a series of honey. Altamira cave, in Cantabria, Spain, contains images of honeycombs, aged around 25,000 years ago. The Mesolithic Cueva de la Arana Rock Shelter, in Valencia, Spain, shows a collection of pollen, bee swarms, and men ascending ladders to get to the flowers, 10,000 years ago.

Many researchers claim that gathering honey is much older than our immediate relatives, the primates, are actively gathering honey on their own. Crittenden stated that Lower Palaeolithic Oldowan stone tools may have been used to break open beehives, and there is no excuse why Australopithecine or early Homo should not have done so.

The ancient Egyptians used honey as a sweetener, as an offering to their gods, and as an element in the embalming oil. Honey cakes were made by the Egyptians and used as a sacrifice to please the gods. The Greeks, too, produced cakes with honey and gave them to the gods.

Tel Rehov

The oldest documented main honey processing facility to date is Iron Age Tel Rehov, in the Jordan Valley of northern Israel. At this location, a large facility with unfired clay cylinders had the remains with honey bee drones, workers, pupae, and larvae. An additional 100-200 hives have been used in this apiary. Each hive had a small hole on one side to allow the bees to enter and leave, and a lid on the other side to give the beekeepers access to the honeycomb. The hives were demolished between 826 and 970 BC. To date, about 30 hives have been excavated. Scholars conclude the bees are Anatolian honey bees, based on the morphometric analysis. This bee is not native to the area at present.

Beekeeping evidence

The archives dating to the Bronze Era of the Mediterranean was the earliest evidence of this. Minoan texts, written in Linear B, identify large honey stores and, based on historical evidence, most other Bronze Age nations, including Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, and the Hittite empire, all had beekeeping operations. Talmudic laws of the 6th century BC define the principles of the production of honey on the Sabbath and the location where it was appropriate to put the hives compared to human buildings.

Bee

Twenty-five thousand particular assortments of bee have been portrayed, separated into eleven families, different subfamilies, tribes and genera, and numerous more various species and sub-species.

Honeybees belong to the Apidae tribe, which involves others also like, bumblebees (Bombinae) and stingless bees (Meliponinae). The Apinae subfamily comprises of one Apini tribe, consisting of one Apis genus. There are four species within the genus: flora, dorsata, cerana and mellifera, although only the last two are appropriate for apiculture in new, moveable comb hives. Read More about Bee...

Traditional use of honey

Honey in ancient Egypt

Nectar was the foremost common Egyptian medication to be recorded 500 times in 900 remedies. It may be a medicine for a normal wound treatment contained within the Smith Papyrus and Egyptian content dated from 2600 to 2200 B.C.

Honey in ancient Greece

Oenomel is an ancient Greek cocktail composed of honey and unfermented grape juice. This is also used as a common medicine for gout and other nervous disorders. Hippocrates, a great Greek physician, advocated a basic diet, choosing honey as oxymel (vinegar and sugar) for discomfort, hydromel (beer and sugar) for thirst, and a combination of fruit, beer and other herbal substances for acute fever.

Uses of Honey in Indian Siddha & Ayurveda 

Perhaps no one has investigated the benefits of honey in as much depth as the Indians have. Honey was deemed a gift by nature to humans and was used as an essential element in every kitchen. It has been used as an essential aspect of the diet for adults above 12 months of age. Honey was deemed a pre-digested food which was proven to be easily digested by human beings. Some of the applications of honey in both Ayurveda and Siddha is a medicinal device. Once combined with sugar, medicines are readily and rapidly consumed by the body and distributed across the bloodstream by blood circulation. Honey is often known to maintain the potency of the medication and increasing its effectiveness.

Siddha texts prescribe honey as part of the treatment of ushna (loosely translated as heat) related symptoms, excess mucosa, diarrhoea, gas symptoms and impurities in the blood. Siddha texts identify seven specific forms of honey, of which honey obtained from thick mountain woods, regarded as malaithen or mountain honey, is said to have the highest medicinal value. That kind of honey is claimed to have the properties of several medicinal plants from which nectar is obtained by the bees.

Facts

➤ Honey is healthy for the blood.

➤ Nice Honey is Antibacterial and Antiseptic.

➤ Eating honey will help make you smarter! It is the only product that includes pinocembrin that is an antioxidant that enhances brain activity.

➤ There are several various forms of honey that taste special based on the flowers used to produce it.

➤ The world's oldest honey in ceramic jars approximately 5,500 years old were uncovered in Georgia in the Tomb of a noblewoman. We say the honey never comes to an end.

➤ Honey used to be of value in Europe until the Renaissance when the introduction of sugar from further afield indicated that honey was used less. Sugar was used less as a sweetener by the 17th century, and honey was used even less. 

➤ Although bees were considered to have unique abilities, they were also seen as emblems:

• Pope Urban VIII used the bee as a symbol of his own.
• The bee was the symbol of the King of Lower Egypt during the First Dynasty (3,200BC).
• The flag of Napoleon was bearing a single line of bees in formation, and his cape was embroidered with bees.
• During the third century BC, the bee became the symbol used on coins in the Greek region of Ephesus.
• The bee was the emblem of the Greek goddess Artemis.
• The bee became the symbol of Eros / Cupid.

Be curious to know more...