Honey: An Origin Story, Part 1

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I don’t know about y’all, but I love honey! It seemed to me that since honey is basically the first sweetener people had, we still like it, we’re always talking about bee populations, and we still ferment with it, we should talk about honey! Before we talk about honey, though, we need to talk about bees! Mostly western honey bees, but bees nonetheless.

It should be noted that although many sources will claim that honey bees aren’t native to North America, this is only true within the context of the time humans have been on the continent (or existing at all). Until the 17th-century, when Europeans brought western honey bees to North America, the only (as far as I know) known native honey bee went extinct in the Oligocene epoch. Monkeys existed then, though not in North America, but definitely not humans.

What a cute little guy. She looks to be on something minty! Roberto Lopez/Getty

The western or European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is what most people are talking about when they’re fretting over the declining population of bee colonies and really just when they’re thinking about honey at all. Although many people will tell you that this one bee is the only honey-producing bee, this is just not true. There are other cute ones out there! But WHBs are absolutely the most prolific honey producers, and they’ve also got substantially wider coverage than any other bee.

Western honey bees are originally from Asia, around 300k years ago. It was previously thought that they were native to parts of Africa and spread from there, but recent DNA analysis makes Asia look more solid as their point of origin. From there, they spread to Europe and Africa, and later were taken by humans to all other parts of the world except Antarctica.

There’s a small pile of honey bee species, and even more subspecies. Since my inclination is to show you all of them, this means I should instead give y’all a smaller sampling. Other types of honey bees include:

The eastern honey bee (Apis cerana)! This little lady is out and about, seeing the sights. Their native range spans from portions of eastern Russia down throughout southeast Asia, portions of the Near East, and the Indian subcontinent. They were introduced to some other areas of the world by humans, and are now considered an invasive species in Australia due to its displacement of other, native pollinators.

Koschevnikov’s honey bee (Apis koschevnikovi) is native to Indonesian and Malasian areas. These also can play nicely with the easterns above. Their range is dwindling due to human encroachment in the evergreen rainforests they occupy. Not tons is known about these bees relative to others, but they are able to coexist with eastern honeybees.

African bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) is a subspecies of western honey bees, and are from Africa, which I bet you guessed! Specifically, their natural range runs throughout central, eastern, and western Africa. If you go south, you get different bees. These little guys are 50% of the much-feared Africanized bees. The other half are regular honey bees. It should be noted that these Africanized bees are really not any more violent than western honey bees, but rather simply respond to threats more quickly and with more soldiers. The Africanized bees apparently are redomesticated and a popular choice for beekeepers in Brazil. Didn’t know!

The Himalayan giant honey bee (Apis dorsata laboriosa) are found only in the Hymalayan Mountain range. I am listing these ones because these guys are the biggest, measuring upwards of 3cm (1.2”) for a single bug. You can get high from the spring honey they make, because it has a lot of rhododendron pollen. A single hive can contain upwards of 60kg (130#) of honey! Need some really big bees to need that much honey for a hive!

Although there are sooooooooo many honey bees I want to show you, this is a good start. There are also, for those of you who didn’t know, stingless bees (not honey bees) that make honey, and even non-bee insects that make honey exist! They tend to make a lot less, but are cultivated by beekeepers in some parts of the world. This video is about Manduri (Melipona marginata) in Brazil. The video is in Portuguese, which I don’t speak, but the video is informative nonetheless.

Pollination

I want to talk about this “briefly,” because when people are talking about bees, they’re also usually talking about colony collapses and the notion that humans will die without western honey bees due to lack of food.

Y’all, this just isn’t true. I am big on western honey bee conservation, as well as conservation of basically all other pollinators, but more than 60% of global crops can keep on keepin’ on without the humble WHB. None of the 10 most important crops globally require pollinators at all to produce food, and food plants native to the Americas all have specialized native pollinators (in America, at least) that pollinate them. In many cases, honey bees lack the physical characteristics required to pollinate a lot of American species of plants.

Interestingly, in a number of flowering plant species, honey bees can reduce pollination of those flowers, due to how many different kinds of plants honey bees like to visit while it’s out and about in the world. What basically happens here is that the WHBs bop on over to a flower, rummage around, and then go to an unrelated flower next and drop that pollen there. As a result of this tremendous lack of specialization and haphazard flower visiting (which is also part of why they’re so important to us), many flowers lose the ability to produce fruit if a native species didn’t get to that flower first.

WHBs are super, super efficient pollinators when they’re pollinating, but they also function as an invasive species in most parts of the world, outcompeting many native pollinators into extinction. So yes: let’s preserve honey bees, for sure. We do need them! But let’s also recognize that we can absolutely live without them and that other important species are dying off because of them.

The red and black mason wasp is my personal favorite pollinator. Although they can sting (and do sting food for their babies), it takes an act of the gods to get them to do it for defense. They are super friendly little critters, and if they get to know you they will sit on your knee or laptop if you’re working outside during their breaks. Most of my garden is pollinated by bumblebees, an assortment of wasps, butterflies, and flies. We get honey bees in my garden, but my assumption is that the industry of all the others isn’t leaving much behind for them because they’re less common than basically any other native pollinator (or other invasives) that I can think of. Less than 10% of my garden is ornamental, the rest being comprised of food and medicinal plants.

Oh yeah! That wasp in the picture is male. The females have red shapes on their heads instead of cream.

To be clear, wasps do not make honey. I’m highlighting this little guy because this type of wasp, which drinks nectar, is also a pollinator! Although they really are normally quite shy (and are solitary, not living in communal nests like some other wasps do), they can be quite friendly if you’ve become part of their landscape! I like them a lot. I’m partial to wasps in general, but these are the best. I encourage y’all, if you’re able and interested, to do some exploration of the native pollinators in your area. There’s a whole world of interesting bugs that no one really ever talks about out there!

Now that we’ve looked at bees a bit, I’m going to go on ahead and do this in two parts so that each subtopic gets the right attention. Honey itself will be next Sunday!