Bee Products

Honeybees not only are smarter than computers, they can outperform them in other functions, too. They can see in color, smell, fly, walk, maintain their balance, navigate, do chemical engineering, manufacture, repair, protect, take out the garbage, control indoor climate, and even relocate when necessary. They do all of this and more without any outside assistance or direction. They function independently.

At times bees, like ourselves, can become their own worst enemy. If honey is exposed to them when no flowers are in bloom and the weather is mild, the bees from different colonies will fight over it. Sometimes this fighting, or robbing, becomes intense and spreads from hive to hive in mob like action. If all the bees in one colony are killed, the honey is quickly stolen and carried to other hives. This further intensifies the robbing so that a cluster that was carrying honey into its hive a few minutes earlier is attacked, all of its occupants killed, the honey again stolen, and the process repeated. Usually, once robbing becomes intense, only darkness or foul weather will stop it.

And bees, like us, are just as susceptible to bacterial and viral invasions. American foulbrood, caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus larvae, is the most serious brood disease. It occurs throughout the world wherever bees are kept. The spores are highly resistant to heat and antibiotics. This disease can be rapidly spread in healthy colonies by transferring equipment or allowing healthy bees to feed on honey from infected colonies. It is spread worldwide, is highly resistant to conventional medications, and is easily spread from person to person through the air or by physical contact.

Ancient cultures, both primitive as well as sophisticated, understood the impact of bees on human existence better than many of us do at present. Bees have been deified in holy writ since time immemorial. The Talmud and Torah of the Jews, the Christians' Bible, the Koran of Islam, and the Book of Mormon have all praised the efforts of the industrious bee and given it holy status. In fact, that section in the Book of Mormon written by an ancient Jaredite prophet known as Ether (2:3) some three millennia ago in the Americas is quite explicit with regard to these useful creatures.

Bees were important in a lot of different ways. Egyptian priests and physicians regarded them as small, winged messengers from the gods, sent to earth to create wonderful food and medicine for man. The Chinese extolled the virtues of these insects and equated them with their own emperors in terms of importance. In the Ayurveda of ancient India, bees were the physical composites of invisible forces that, imparted life and health through the substances they willingly manufactured for the good of all.

Illustrations of the prehistoric use of certain bee products in the Stone Age can be found in some of the cave artwork of Europe and South Africa. The first substantial evidence for honey gathering and the use of beeswax or honeycomb appear in the rock paintings of eastern Spain. They are dated from 18,000 to 11,000 B.C. The cave of Altamira near Santander on the Spanish north coast is especially famous for a ceiling painting of polychrome bison and other Ice Age fauna in one of its side chambers, which has been called "the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art." On the ceiling of this side chamber may be seen quite clearly four scutiforms, executed in brown lines and intended to represent bees' combs. Painted next to these "combs" are several small ladders, indicating honey-hunting activities at a very early period of time. What this also tells us is that bees actually existed during major glacier periods of the last Ice Age, along with Neanderthal people. Apparently, bees were able to survive the cold without much problem.

Over 4,000 rock-art sites containing either rock paintings or petroglyphs have been discovered in South Africa and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). It appears that most of these rock paintings were executed during the last four millennia. It is known that many of the paintings were drawn by the ancient ancestors of the Bushmen, a race of yellow-skinned pygmies believed to be the aborigines of Southern Africa. They were hunters and food gatherers who practiced a Stone Age culture right into modern times.

Scientists who have studied such findings don't seem to think that these ancient ancestors of the Bushmen were regular bee-keepers as such. It isn't logical for these semi nomadic Stone Age people to go to the trouble of fabricating hives. More than likely they would rob honey and honeycomb from wild beehives they encountered in their wanderings.

The gifts that bees give to mankind include

• beeswax
• bee pollen
• honey
• propolis
• royal jelly