I'm often ashamed of my fellow humans for the way they corrupt good and natural things into something appealing, but not good and not natural. Sometimes I'm also a little ashamed of bees for being so easily corruptible by these products.
Let's talk about sugar water. Bees like it. Or at least they like it better than starving. Beekeepers starting a new colony will often offer sugar water to the bees, since the bees haven't yet stored honey and it takes a lot of food to make wax and mold it into combs. If early in the season, it's a good idea, and the bees will take the sugar water for a few days or weeks until they can get a store of more wholesome nectar they can eat. Nectar is the adult bees' natural food, the one they should always prefer, and usually they will stop eating the sugar water as soon as they can, so there's little worry that it'll get into the honey that people buy.
That's why it's alarming to sometimes read news stories of beekeepers finding artificially red or blue or green honey in their hives. In the case of the unnaturally red honey, it was beekeepers in Brooklyn who suddenly started finding it in their hives. It turns out that a nearby maraschino cherry factory kept its windows open on hot days, and the bees got into the syrup the factory used for coloring and sweetening natural cherries into those things you put on top of sundaes. A New York Times article posed the disturbing question, “If the bees cannot resist . . . what hope do the rest of us have?”
Even more disturbing was the case of the red, green, and blue honey, in that it took place in France, where they are rather particular about their food and have long resisted the Americanization of their cuisine. In 2012, dozens of beekeepers in the area around the town of Ribeauvillé (Alsace) traced the horrifying honey colors to waste from a Mars Candy Co. plant that made M&Ms. Honey from Mars? Sacre red, green and bleu!
In the 1950s and early 60s, a “beehive” was a popular hairstyle in which the hair was piled and teased to create a dome on top of the head, similar to a Marge Simpson do (but not as tall, of course). The point was to mimic the shape of what we consider the classic beehive. The still popular “beehive” shape comes from something that is all but extinct in modern times, the skep. We know from ancient art that skeps have been around for at least 2,000 years, sometimes woven from wicker or coils of straw and held together with dried reeds. To make them weatherproof, skeps were often covered with a coat of fresh dung that hardened into a sturdy coating like fired clay.
Skeps did the trick for a long time, and a small number of beekeepers around the world still use them, but they've fallen out of favor and are actually illegal in most American states. The reason is that unlike more modern beehives, you can't inspect the bulk of the combs for disease or mites. That's because the bees actually build their combs on the tops and sides of the skep, making a solid mass, instead of modular, removable frames.
Not only can you not inspect the hives, but it's also hard to harvest honey without doing often lethal damage to the colony. In fact, for many centuries most beekeepers didn't even try to keep bees alive after the honey season. They'd kill them all with burning sulfur fumes, extract the honey, wax, and dead bees, and start over again with a new collection of bees the following year.
It's hard to imagine doing that. I guess if you're part of a farming culture, in which slaughtering animals is a regular and expected occurrence, slaughtering bees also makes sense, especially if you're housing them in something where you can't easily harvest the honey without doing harm (and probably get stung many times in the process). Still, after years of trying to keep bees alive, of being careful to leave them enough honey to get comfortably through the winter, the unnecessary waste and carnage is incomprehensible to me. But then again, I admit to having a tender heart and squeamish stomach.
. . . for many centuries
most beekeepers
didn't even try to keep
bees alive after the
honey season.
