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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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In which, with ears a-buzzing, Fayza Hassan follows the honey trailArchers escorted honey-gatherers in the days of Ramses III. It was believed that their arrows would ward off poisonous bee stings. Today, masks and smoke help the hunters strike gold
photos: Randa Shaath
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
And thy Lord taught the Bee
To build its cells in hills
On trees and in habitations
(Qur'an, sura 16, Al-Nahl)HONEY TO DIE FOR:
"If there is a buzzing noise, somebody is making a buzzing noise and the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you're a bee."
Then [Winnie the Pooh] thought for another long time and said: "And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey."
And then he got up and said: "And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it."
Unlike baby Zeus, who is said to have been nursed by the bees on honey from which he derived his infinite wisdom, the famous bear did not greatly benefit from the frequent consumption of the magic food and therefore decided to climb the tallest tree in the forest, suspecting that this was where bees had made their nest, high up in a cavity large enough to contain a colony of insects busy making the delicacy to which he was so partial. His spectacular fall from the summit has been fully documented by A A Milne, to the greatest enjoyment of generations of children.
BORN FREE: Before bees were domesticated and forced to work for men, they lived in the wilderness, particularly in forests where the most fragrant flowers could be found. Wild bees found a suitably sheltered cave, a hollow in a rock or tree, then set to work, filling the hole with the wax they secrete to make their combs, and sending the bee-scouts out to find the flowers and blossoms from which they would extract nectar and pollen. Buds to provide resin were also essential.
The nectar they soon turned into honey, their everyday fare, while using the pollen to feed the larvae. Resin was a necessary ingredient in the making of bee-glue, good for constructing a strong defensive wall at the entrance of the hive. Apart from secreting honey, wax and glue, bees manufacture a remarkable substance in their bodies, royal jelly, which enables a larva to reach sexual maturity and become a fertile queen. This, however, was not known until the 1970s, when the properties of the magic secretion were discovered and humans in search of the fountain of youth hastened to exploit it. Today, alternative medicine uses the pollen gathered by bees as well as royal jelly and both are regarded as rejuvenating elixirs.
OUT OF THE WILDERNESS: From time immemorial, humans have stolen the honey of wild bees for their own use -- and gastronomic delight. To make sure that their supply would not end any time soon, they had to have more control over the makers. Large chunks of tree where hives were established were cut out and carried away from the forests to more accessible locations. Honey could thus be collected with ease. Virgil mentions the necessity of smoking the hive to make the bees drowsy before attempting the operation. History has recorded many instances in which ignorant honey gatherers destroyed the whole hive and killed the bees for just one harvest of honey: "Sometimes the humans come to search for us. If we are not able to defend ourselves against them, they destroy our homes, kill our children and steal the honey that we have made and stored up. They take all the honey and leave none for us," complained the king of the bees to the Djinn in The Island of Animals, a modern adaptation of one of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity written in Basra in the tenth century AD.
TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE: Ancient Egyptians were the first to exploit honey by breeding bees to make it. They practised apiculture but also collected a great deal of wild honey. Bees were ruthlessly plundered and would have been wiped out had some proper regulations not been elaborated. Bees in the Egyptian countryside are now domesticated and numerous beekeepers are profiting, albeit less wickedly, from the labour of the industrious little insects.
Some time ago, I was invited to visit Taha Megahed Wahdan, who brings his bees to Nubariya every spring. I had tasted the honey he produced and found it absolutely delicious. Doreen, a colleague and his sister-in-law, had then suggested that I go see for myself how it was made. I eventually agreed, but -- unlike Pooh's -- mine was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Although there was no precarious tree to climb in search of the elusive nest, I postponed the expedition several times, thinking that bees in a hive were not only of little interest but, cooped up against their will, might turn out to be downright hostile. I usually take the fewest possible risks in obtaining my nourishment, no matter how toothsome; as long as I was getting all the honey I wanted from a handy jar, I saw no reason to investigate its source. Really, I was not longing for first-hand observation, especially not if it entailed an intimate encounter with aggressively busy creatures which, from childhood on, I had been taught to hastily dodge whenever accidentally met at close range.
I tried to suggest that I could write about bees without actually seeing them, then convinced myself that I did not wish to write about them at all. Still, the idea kept buzzing in my head. Finally, one sunny morning last week, having been solemnly promised that I would be provided with the proper protective equipment, I gallantly rose to the occasion and we headed towards Nubariya and its delicately scented honey.
GETTING ACQUAINTED: Wahdan owns 25 beehives, which he moves to different areas according to the season. Honey is taken in the summer months. The first harvest, which produces the finest honey, is gathered when the bees have had a chance to finish the nectar flow from the first flowering seasons. (The nectar is a sweet substance, 75 per cent water with certain mineral elements extracted from flowers by the bee as it flies from one blossom to the other.) Nectar attracts insects whose feet become laden with pollen as they work and they are then instrumental in pollinating the surrounding plants for fertilisation and, subsequently, the bearing of fruit.
Bees fill their honey sacs with nectar, in which change occurs on the way back to the hive, caused by the enzymes in the insect saliva and gastric juices. In the hive, the bee regurgitates the liquid and deposits it in the wax cells of the comb. To concentrate it further, the worker bees ingest and regurgitate the liquid again, beating their wings to ventilate the hive. It takes 20 minutes for the process to be completed, whereupon the full cells are capped with wax secreted from the abdomen of wax-making bees. According to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, it takes 5 litres of nectar to make one litre of honey and each litre of nectar requires from 20,000 to 10,000 bees' sorties, bearing in mind that a bee can cover a distance of several kilometres each time. "The quality of honey depends on the flowers visited by the bees, since it retains their fragrance and other properties... The bee is particular in its choice of flowers, and a methodical worker. If it visits only a single species of flower in a day, it has to ingest nectar from 10,000 chalices for a single drop of honey to be deposited in a cell," writes Toussaint-Samat.
We have come just in time: the bees have finished working on the citrus orchards and are about to be transported to Abu Hommos, where, explains Wahdan, the fields are of more arduous access to the non-initiated. When the bees are gathering honey for him, Wahdan pays the owners of the selected fields a set fee per beehive, and when his bees are required to pollinate plants for other farmers from which they will not make good quality honey (squash and courgette crops, for instance), he charges for their services.
As a student of agricultural engineering, Wahdan studied beekeeping at university as part of the curriculum. After graduation, he was employed by Nubacid, a government seed producing company which used bees extensively, mainly for pollination purposes. A nearby dairy company, the now defunct Dallah, was also marketing an excellent honey at the time, which Wahdan often bought for his friends in Cairo and Alexandria. When Nubacid was privatised and Dallah went under, he accepted to cash in his early retirement bonus and, having bought the company house he had occupied previously, he established himself in the area as a full-time beekeeper. He has been producing his own honey for the past nine years.
Ahmed Saleh, Hani Hegazi Saleh (Ahmed's nephew) and Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid are his regular helpers. Ahmed takes one third of the honey produced in lieu of wages, as is the custom in the trade, and has trained the two younger men he employs. Wahdan, on the other hand, contributed the initial capital and is responsible for any further disbursements. The scientific aspect of bee raising is his province and he is in the process of writing a book on the subject, leaving to Ahmed and his assistants the task of working the hives.
As we chit-chat about bees, honey, royal jelly and its alleged miraculous properties, I am beginning to hope that we might just keep on sipping tea and skip the pragmatic side of the visit. Wahdan, however, does not see it that way and, having made sure that none of us are wearing strong perfume -- a good thing I did not have the inclination to overdo the Laura Biagiotti at 6.00am -- he distributes protective masks made of metallic mesh, held together by strips of strong fabric, which look rather like slightly squashed space helmets, and drives us to the nearby orchard accompanied by Ahmed, Hani and Ibrahim. They will have to stand in for the archers who usually escorted honey-gatherers in the days of Ramses III, their arrows poised to ward off the bees' stings.
As we prepare to set foot in the orchard, there is some confusion which I don't quite grasp at first. It appears that bees are disturbed by the colour black, and Doreen's daughter, Sarah, has to exchange her dark sweater for the white shirt Wahdan's wife Laila is wearing before donning her mask. Laila will stay behind, she has seen enough bees to last her a lifetime, she says.
The men lead the way and I bravely follow. The hive-boxes, large rectangular containers equipped with movable wooden frames, are placed in neat rows under the trees, which have just lost their blossoms and are therefore no longer able to offer the bees their fragrant nourishment. This is why they are being taken tonight to Abu Hommos, where different blooms await them. "From ancient times, migratory beekeeping has also been practised," writes Toussaint-Samat; "the hives are moved with the seasons, sometimes over a great distance. In Scotland, bees were traditionally taken to the moorland heather in summer."
TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT: Explaining that bees can only be moved after sunset, when all the workers have returned to the hives, Ahmed sets fire to a piece of straw matting and introduces it into the cup of a small manual pump with which he smokes out the hive he intends to open. Each box has a slit at the bottom (the door), around which a number of bees are swarming -- "the guardians of the hive," says Ahmed. "They check the traffic for friends or foes; only the worker-bees are allowed in and out," he explains. "Any intruder is repulsed, killed if need be." Hani is opening the box, after smoking it some more "to relax the bees," and pulling out the frames filled with hexagonal wax cells to which hundreds of winged brownish creatures are eagerly climbing over each other. They seem awfully clinging, and I find them slightly repulsive. They become quite interested by the sleeves of my sweater, however. I don't like this. Are they intolerant of dry-cleaning products? I wonder. I refuse to dwell on the possibilities. Wahdan is just saying that bees can smell fear and, disgusted by the unpleasant odour, are quite capable of assaulting the offender. Inappropriately at this moment, I remember the words of the French naturalist Bouffon: "The bee is implacable in its hostility, attacks fearlessly, takes merciless revenge on the wounded enemy, hurls itself furiously forward, and leaves both its sting and its life in the wound." Doreen's husband, Magdi, wants to regale us with a story he has heard in his childhood, which concerned a donkey whose ear was visited by a bee. The donkey quite rightly panicked and had to pay dearly for his lack of nerve. I beg him to stop at once and summon whatever is left of my audacity to continue standing still until the bees complete their exploration of my arms.
Defiantly, albeit in secret, I tell myself that all the stories about the bees' perfectly organised kingdom are largely overrated. "One example [of our wisdom] I can give, said the bee [to the Djinn] is the way in which we bees organise ourselves, how we make our small precisely built houses, each one placed directly against the next, and we make them without the use of any instrument or use of geometry. Look at the manner in which we appoint certain bees to act as porters and others to be guards. Look at the way we gather wax from the leaves of trees with our legs and honey with our lips from the blossoms of plants. Look at how we and our children feed during the winter from the honey we have stored..." In wilder days, maybe; but now all I see is metallic mesh stretched between the sides of the frames, featuring little hexagonal cells in which the bees can construct their comb with more speed, and a mess of insects crawling around in a sticky palette of yellows and browns. My untrained eyes see only terminal confusion where I am supposed to observe highly organised activity. I won't comment, however, lest criticism, like fear, unleash the bees' unjustified wrath.
MEETING THE QUEEN: Hani is checking the frames one by one, in an attempt to locate the queen. "There she is," he says finally, pointing to a distinctly bigger insect lackadaisically crawling out of a larger cell, abrim with a gummy liquid. "These are her servants," he adds excitedly, pointing this time to a number of smaller bees surrounding her. "They are attached to her service, feeding her royal jelly and protecting her at all times... and this is the royal jelly." While speaking he has inserted the nail of his little finger delicately into the royal cell and extracted a tiny drop of the precious stuff, which he shows us triumphantly.
"The queen feeds on royal jelly only," comments Wahdan. "She lives up to seven years and lays millions of eggs. The worker-bees, who only eat honey, have a much shorter life span, which lasts only a few months. This is mainly why people have come to believe in the miraculous effects of royal jelly." I tend to think that the queen's life is longer because, unlike her servants, she is not forced to exert herself at menial and distasteful tasks...
When the queen is no longer fertile, she leaves the hive with her servants and the bees set out to feed a larva with royal jelly in order to enable it to reach sexual maturity and become the new mother of the hive. Sometimes the old queen will select her successor herself and adopt her, explains Wahdan, and in this case the two will reside in the royal cell together, making the exodus of the older generation unnecessary.
DRONE OR DIE: The worker bees draw their energy from the honey with which the nurses also feed the young and the drones (male bees), whose only function is to fertilise the queen. Once the process has been completed, the drone, unable to feed himself alone, is left to starve, or -- if, of a particularly resilient nature, he refuses to fade away gracefully -- is put to death by his former servants and quickly thrown out of the hive.
Ahmed attracts our attention to the lower part of the hive, which contains the larvae or brood and reserves of honey which must not be touched except to check that they are plentiful. If he finds them too low, he increases them with a container of sugary water, to reinforce the bees' diet. This part of the hive is the domain of the nurses (who look after the young and the queen), the wax-making bees (who make and repair the combs) and the bees in charge of general housekeeping. Ahmed insists on slipping a larva into my hand so that I can examine it at close range. It resembles very much a fat white worm with rings already visible on its back. I worry that the bees will think I stole it and come after me, especially that Hani and Ibrahim are cracking the wax off several cells to show us those containing honey and those filled with pollen.
A SWEET FAREWELL: Back at the house, we feast on fitir (a deliciously flaky pastry dripping with butter or ghee), tomatoes, mish (salty, aged white cheese) and honey. Wahdan's teenage daughter Rasha prefers her honey in the form of a facial mask or a hair conditioner. She volunteers several beauty tips where the golden liquid figures supreme, but I don't listen. The taste of this particular honey is too good to be put anywhere but in one's mouth.
Sources:
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, Blackwell, 1994
A A Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, Methuen, 1971
Denys Johnson-Davies, The Island of Animals (illustrated by Sabiha Khemir), University of Texas Press, 1997
