Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: The vault is open and it beckons. That's right. In fact,
Speaker 1: the vault is giving us bees this week, lots of
Speaker 1: bees covered in bees. Yes, they're everywhere because we are
Speaker 1: revisiting an episode that originally published March seventeenth, two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: in which we chat with author entomologist Jean Kritsky, author
Speaker 1: of a wonderful book titled The Tears of Ray. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this episode was a lot of fun. Jean was great
Speaker 1: to talk to, and I remember it fondly, as I
Speaker 1: often do BE related topics, but especially be related topics
Speaker 1: that can get into ancient mythology. Yeah, you have ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt and honey bees. Uh, what's not to love? Author
Speaker 1: in my eyes? All right, let's dive in. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetup works dot com.
Speaker 1: The god Ray wept, and the tears from his eyes
Speaker 1: fell on the ground and turned into a bee. The
Speaker 1: bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers
Speaker 1: of every plant, and so wax was made and also
Speaker 1: honey out of the Tears of Ray. H Hey, welcome
Speaker 1: to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a beautiful
Speaker 1: little reading. Robert, what was that? That quote comes to
Speaker 1: us from a nine translation of a three hundred b
Speaker 1: CE bit of writing. It's it's essentially cursive hieroglyphs, which
Speaker 1: is called the hieratic writing. And more specifically, this wonderful
Speaker 1: uh little expert comes from a book titled The Tears
Speaker 1: of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Jean Kritzky.
Speaker 1: And at the end of this episode we're going to
Speaker 1: chat with the author just a little bit about some
Speaker 1: of the material we're discussing here and about the book
Speaker 1: The Tears of Ray. This was a very interesting book.
Speaker 1: Robert and I both read it for this episode, and
Speaker 1: it essentially it covers the relationship between the ancient Egyptians
Speaker 1: and the honeybee, the complex economic, religious, and scientific relationship,
Speaker 1: you might say, going back and forth between them. But
Speaker 1: we should start, I guess with Ray, because that's the
Speaker 1: focus of the poems segment you read at the beginning.
Speaker 1: Who is Ray? Ray? You may be more familiar with
Speaker 1: the name Raw are a uh, the sun god, the
Speaker 1: creator god of the ancient Egyptians, as often depicted as
Speaker 1: sort of like a bird's head, the head of a falcon,
Speaker 1: but also a sun disc that travels across the sky
Speaker 1: and then of as dusk it gets eaten and then
Speaker 1: goes into the underworld. Well, actually I think those are
Speaker 1: two different myths. Right, it goes into the underworld and
Speaker 1: then comes back out. But there's another version where Ray
Speaker 1: gets eaten and then gets re birthed. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: a there's a lot of material about the like he
Speaker 1: travels across the sky and a solar barge, and then
Speaker 1: there's a different barge that travels through the underworld at night,
Speaker 1: and and sometimes the additional gods on those barges. It's uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's very complex. One of the things I definitely
Speaker 1: did find out from this book is that these days,
Speaker 1: if you want to be in line with the academic
Speaker 1: Egyptology community, you say Ray, not Raw. Now. I I
Speaker 1: got Raw from the movie Stargate, where Raw is the
Speaker 1: bad guy who is essentially an alien version of an
Speaker 1: Egyptian god. But but that that's not anymore, it's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Plus most most Egyptologists dismiss uh Stargate as a reputable
Speaker 1: source of real days. Yeah. I don't know why, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, this this episode, I hopefully what we're gonna
Speaker 1: do here is is we will will allow you to
Speaker 1: leave the podcast with maybe a little more understanding and
Speaker 1: respect for the kingdom of the bees and a little
Speaker 1: more respect and understanding for the kingdom of ancient Egypt,
Speaker 1: because there's a there's so much complexity in both and uh,
Speaker 1: and it's fascinating to sort of look here at this
Speaker 1: this kingdom within a kingdom and how they how they
Speaker 1: were related to each other. Oh, the b kingdom within
Speaker 1: the Egyptian yea, because because yeah, we have a monarch, uh,
Speaker 1: monarchy within the honey bee hive, and then workers we
Speaker 1: have a lot of workers toiling away involved in this industry.
Speaker 1: And then uh, we have this we have ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: We have another monarchy with a very complex system of order. Uh,
Speaker 1: A lot of industry going on, a lot of workers
Speaker 1: toiling to make it all possible. And also sort of
Speaker 1: a two ways cyber by addic symbiotic relationship. Yeah. Indeed,
Speaker 1: but I guess we should start with the bee first,
Speaker 1: because obviously the b pre dates ancient Egypt as a civilization,
Speaker 1: probably not the land mass. So Robert, where do bees
Speaker 1: come from? Well, I'm glad you asked, Joe. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you about the bees. Uh, you'd have to travel
Speaker 1: back about a hundred million maybe a hundred thirty million years,
Speaker 1: depending on who you're talking to, all the way back
Speaker 1: to the Cretaceous period. Okay, you'd find dinosaurs roam to
Speaker 1: the earth. Yeah. Yeah, we're going away back here, and
Speaker 1: you find a world rather different than the one we're
Speaker 1: we encountered today. Uh, devoid of flowering plants and occupied
Speaker 1: mostly by conifers, which depend on the wind to spread
Speaker 1: their seats. Can you imagine that? I mean a world
Speaker 1: where where reproduction depends entirely on the whims of the weather.
Speaker 1: Like can you imagine if animals Because trees can't walk
Speaker 1: around and find each other to mate, they're stuck in
Speaker 1: place ease and bushes, you know, whatever you want. Plants
Speaker 1: are not very mobile, so they essentially have to spray
Speaker 1: their reproductive material into the air, just hoping it gets
Speaker 1: somewhere worthwhile by chance. Yeah. Indeed, this is just an
Speaker 1: earlier state, and there's just the the the evolution of
Speaker 1: seed transfer. So there are no flowers and there's certainly
Speaker 1: no pollination. Now there were There were no bees at
Speaker 1: this point, but there were wasps. And these wasps were
Speaker 1: also kind of different from the wasps that we encounter today.
Speaker 1: They were hymenoptera, the order that wasts and bees are in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: indeed they were, now they were, but they were carnivorous.
Speaker 1: They preyed on spiders and other insects and many of
Speaker 1: which in turn fed on vegetation. Uh so a lot. So,
Speaker 1: so we have a traffic going on here all right.
Speaker 1: Seeds are going into the air, the wasps are eating
Speaker 1: the insects that live on the plants. But plant of
Speaker 1: evolution eventually begins to make the most out of this
Speaker 1: constant insect traffic, using it like the wind and to
Speaker 1: carry a genetic material from plant to plant, and this
Speaker 1: results in the rise of angiosperms. These are plants that
Speaker 1: depend on insects to spread genetic material and pollen from
Speaker 1: male plant parts called anthers to female parts called stigmas.
Speaker 1: This is one of those moments I often want to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: how smart that is. It's like as if somebody planned it. Now,
Speaker 1: of course it wasn't These are just the the wonderful
Speaker 1: ingenuities of evolution acting upon the environment. But uh, it's
Speaker 1: fascinating how things like this come about. So you have
Speaker 1: to imagine a system where these plants are pollinating by wind,
Speaker 1: but they have this this sperm the pollination material I
Speaker 1: guess you would say pollen. Uh, And somehow insects start
Speaker 1: getting this stuff on their bodies. Right, Essentially, a new
Speaker 1: wind emerges and that wind is the movement of these insects.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, once that works out for long enough,
Speaker 1: plants sort of evolve traits to specialize in that mode
Speaker 1: of transmission. It's no longer accident, it's how they work now.
Speaker 1: In indeed, you see the the emergence of the delicious
Speaker 1: nectar to sweeten the deal for the pollen carrying insects,
Speaker 1: saying hey, come here, get all nice and covered in polony.
Speaker 1: And I'm totally anthropomorphizing the entire process here, My apologies,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, essentially bribing the insects with the with
Speaker 1: the the delicious nectar to get them to carry the pollen,
Speaker 1: giving them a specific reason to traffic the parts of
Speaker 1: the plant where pollen is produced. So I can imagine
Speaker 1: if you're some wasp d thirty five thirty million years
Speaker 1: ago and you've been hunting insects. That's that's tough work,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's really tough. Now, if you could
Speaker 1: just start getting all of your meals from a passive
Speaker 1: plant that will sit there and let you just lap
Speaker 1: up delicious sweet things from its open maw, that I mean,
Speaker 1: what a nice deal. Yeah, Yes, suddenly there's this, there's
Speaker 1: this wonderful new way to get the food you need now. Granted,
Speaker 1: there's still there's still sort of tie to their predatory past,
Speaker 1: and indeed today, um you'll you have you can look
Speaker 1: at most common wasps and they're depending upon upon nectar
Speaker 1: as their primary food, but they still have to turn
Speaker 1: to their carnivorous ways when it comes to rearing their young,
Speaker 1: implanting their young in the belly off another creature wasps.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, which is just a wonderful area that
Speaker 1: we have explored in past podcast and I'm sure will
Speaker 1: return in the future. Christian and I talked about it
Speaker 1: in our X Files episode. Yes of course, yeah, that
Speaker 1: parasitoid wasps are Not only is it just an endlessly
Speaker 1: fascinating area, but we just get new studies each year
Speaker 1: with either a new type of parasitoid wasp or some
Speaker 1: new details about a species we are already familiar with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the wasps evolved to to live off of what
Speaker 1: is provided by the plants, and in an interesting way,
Speaker 1: I think we could think about this as the plants
Speaker 1: domesticating livestock. Yeah, the plants have domesticated the live stock
Speaker 1: of in insects in order to do their bidding. And
Speaker 1: of course the wasps are one thing, but it's the
Speaker 1: bees where we really see this takeoff, because of course
Speaker 1: bees evolve from wasps, they're all related. But the bees
Speaker 1: are actually they're getting the nectar. They're bringing it back
Speaker 1: for their young. They're they're they're they're they're creating honey,
Speaker 1: they're creating these uh, these these waxy nests. They are
Speaker 1: completely beholden to the nectar. Uh. They're no longer going
Speaker 1: out and and specifically killing other creatures to rear their young. Okay,
Speaker 1: so when we're talking about honey bees, true honey bees,
Speaker 1: that this is the genus APIs right, Yes, and that's
Speaker 1: why we also refer to it as uh is apriculture.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, bee keeping not the keeping of apes. A
Speaker 1: fun fact to remember, by the way, next time you're
Speaker 1: adding a dab of honey to your earl gray tea,
Speaker 1: Is that honey is bee barf? Right? Yes? Is how
Speaker 1: honey is produced. It's produced by uh bees grabbing some
Speaker 1: sweet nectar, which is pretty much sugar water from plants
Speaker 1: and then going through a complex process of regurgitation and evaporation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're kind of uh, you know, distilling it, refining
Speaker 1: it through their They're just regigitation of the material, you know,
Speaker 1: And I should I should also mentioned that, uh, when
Speaker 1: it comes to two bees, we have bumble bees, we
Speaker 1: have stingless bees, and we even have a few other
Speaker 1: non bee species that produce honey and small amounts. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, we're you know, we're dealing with
Speaker 1: those uh, those APIs honey bees, which are the superstars,
Speaker 1: the generators of like a true bounty and excess of honey,
Speaker 1: uh in the amount that it makes sense for humans
Speaker 1: to raise them and pillage their stores. Now, when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, I used to wonder how we eat honey.
Speaker 1: But I know bees make honey. I did not know
Speaker 1: that they barfed honey up for us. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that they made honey, but I didn't know what they
Speaker 1: did with it. I was like, why do they make it?
Speaker 1: Is it just? What is it? What's it for? Did
Speaker 1: the bees themselves eat the honey? Yeah, they stored as
Speaker 1: a primary food source. They also eat what is called
Speaker 1: bee bread, which is a semiary cute name. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's essentially like a pollen cake, you know. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the the honey is a food source for the bee people,
Speaker 1: if you will. Um, And they stored away and those
Speaker 1: waxy cells in the honeycomb. But you mentioned wax. Of course,
Speaker 1: wax is another important byproduct of bee culture. It's it's
Speaker 1: their second great technology, yes, indeed, and uh and the
Speaker 1: wax that the workers actually secrete from specialized glands on
Speaker 1: the underside of their abdomen's wait what they secrete it? Yeah? Essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, you can think of them as like wax nipples.
Speaker 1: I guess, um, the bee the bees have wax nipples
Speaker 1: and they put out the wax and what it's a
Speaker 1: little flaky lipids for us. Yeah, And they get the
Speaker 1: raw materials for this metabolized product through the consumption of
Speaker 1: that honey and that be bread, which we already mentioned
Speaker 1: and the be bread. Uh I should also have have
Speaker 1: pointed out that it's essentially a collected fermented pollen. So um,
Speaker 1: so these service the so it kind of goes around
Speaker 1: in a circle, right, the nectar, the honey, the wax,
Speaker 1: this whole um, this whole little little city for the insects,
Speaker 1: built from the bounty of the flowers. Yeah. Now, long
Speaker 1: before humans started formalized apriculture, before they started making bee
Speaker 1: hives to keep bees in to sort of have an
Speaker 1: agriculture of insects, they hunted honey. Right, there was wild
Speaker 1: honey hunting. The same way you would hunt game in
Speaker 1: the forest or on the savannah, you could hunt honey
Speaker 1: just as it occurred in a bee hive that might
Speaker 1: be hanging from a tree. And there are actually ancient
Speaker 1: works of cave art that depict this. Yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: also honey hunting traditions that survived to this day. And
Speaker 1: it's essentially the same thing a bear does. Right of
Speaker 1: a bear breaks into a honey hive or a honey badger,
Speaker 1: it goes after some some bees as well. You just
Speaker 1: you find out where the hive is, you locate it,
Speaker 1: and then you you who is the best skills at
Speaker 1: your disposal to break in there and get as much
Speaker 1: dripping honeycomb as possible and run off with it. Now,
Speaker 1: Krisky's book has an illustration, or not an illustration. It
Speaker 1: does have an illustration, but also a photo of this
Speaker 1: great cave painting from Spain that seems to depict honey
Speaker 1: hunting from How how old is this thing? Yeah, this
Speaker 1: dates back seven thousand to eight thousand years, so that
Speaker 1: gives us a rough estimate not not not where it began,
Speaker 1: but at least how far it probably goes. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so what what's depicted in the painting is this great setup.
Speaker 1: It looks like a scene from a movie where you've
Speaker 1: got somebody hanging from a rope apparently off a cliff,
Speaker 1: being lowered down to an area where there's a tree
Speaker 1: with a bee's nest hanging off of it, and reaching
Speaker 1: in to grab the honey and you can see bees
Speaker 1: swarming around the person. I mean, that's a lot of
Speaker 1: trust in whoever's holding the rope, right, yeah, and uh
Speaker 1: and and and you know you're just getting just the
Speaker 1: b Jesus stung out of you the whole time. But
Speaker 1: it's just such I mean especially in a energy density,
Speaker 1: energy counsity of that of that that score. I mean,
Speaker 1: this stuff is just it's pure gold, uh, nutritionally speaking,
Speaker 1: so you're going to occasionally do what it takes to
Speaker 1: get it and bring it back, not to mention the
Speaker 1: value you're going to have bringing that stuff back to
Speaker 1: your community. But I guess we should now look at
Speaker 1: when when true apriculture started. When did we start having
Speaker 1: bee hives where where we sort of set up an
Speaker 1: enclosure and said bees go live in there, here's where
Speaker 1: you should make your homes, and they obeyed. Alright, So
Speaker 1: it's best we can tell. Bee keeping probably emerged by accident,
Speaker 1: probably in the fertile crescent um. And probably what you
Speaker 1: had happened was you have human industries is creating all
Speaker 1: of these different pots and containers, uh for your various
Speaker 1: agricultural efforts, and one might leave a pot hanging around
Speaker 1: somewhere unused. Suddenly some bees come in, they take up
Speaker 1: a resident in the pot, and this could theoretically serve
Speaker 1: as as like the first accidental bee hive that's actually
Speaker 1: kept by the beekeepers and they realize, oh bees will
Speaker 1: will will actually build their nest in this uh, the spot.
Speaker 1: If I leave it out for them, there's a chance
Speaker 1: I'll have my own captive honey. I've yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: talk about turning a loss into a wind. So imagine
Speaker 1: you know you've got this jar that you were planning
Speaker 1: on keeping full of urgad infested rye uh, and you
Speaker 1: go back to get it and suddenly it's full of
Speaker 1: bees and you're like, oh man, my plans are spoiled.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get stung cleaning this thing out. But then
Speaker 1: you realize you have access to all this sweet sweet honey. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and not only the honey, but the wax. The
Speaker 1: wax is key because uh, there is evidence of lost
Speaker 1: wax castings uh dating back to thirty BC. Now a
Speaker 1: lost wax casting for anyone not familiar, this has to
Speaker 1: do with, uh with a cast used to make uh
Speaker 1: like a metal objects in which it's you build like
Speaker 1: the clay or what have you, around a wax model
Speaker 1: of the thing you're going to build, and then you
Speaker 1: melt the wax out of there. And while you have
Speaker 1: this mold which you can use to make metal tacks.
Speaker 1: It's a way of turning easily multiple wax into metal,
Speaker 1: which is pretty awesome. Yeah. So the only thing here
Speaker 1: is that you don't have to be a beekeeper to
Speaker 1: get that wax. That wax could have been obtained through
Speaker 1: honey hunting. We just don't know. Um. But when when
Speaker 1: it comes to actually finding the the earliest evidence of
Speaker 1: bee raising, of bee keeping, then you really have to
Speaker 1: go to the Egyptians, to the ancient Egyptians. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this would put us around three thousand BC. That's five
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Yeah. I mean it's amazing just to consider,
Speaker 1: completely separate from the topic of beekeeping, how enormously long
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt went on. Yeah, we're talking roughly. You have
Speaker 1: five thousand years of of human history wound up in
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians. U A a civilization that after you know,
Speaker 1: even when it was going it was it was an
Speaker 1: ancient civilization. Um. And of course it's gonna it's impossible
Speaker 1: for us to summarize, you know, thousands of years of
Speaker 1: ancient history, the ebb and flow of political and social
Speaker 1: change here. Uh. You know, in the In the same
Speaker 1: way that Egyptian history is tied closely to the Nile,
Speaker 1: so too is the region's history a long, twisting, swelling,
Speaker 1: shrinking movement. Across the landscape of human history. But to summarize,
Speaker 1: we're talking the civilization of ancient North Africa, generally attributed
Speaker 1: to lasting from roughly thirty one hundred BC to three
Speaker 1: and twenty two uh see. So that's talking about the
Speaker 1: transition out of the Stone Age, out of the Nearithic period,
Speaker 1: the beginning of large scale civilization in ancient Egypt until
Speaker 1: the time I think they mark the end of it
Speaker 1: with the time that the last hieroglyphic carvings were made
Speaker 1: in Egypt. Yes, and it's the one in three hundred
Speaker 1: some things. He correct. Now. You can also some historians
Speaker 1: um And and authors including Jane Chrisky also go ahead
Speaker 1: and include that Neolithic period and that would put the
Speaker 1: beginning around fifty undred BC. So that's where you would
Speaker 1: get a total time period of around uh five thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty three years of culture. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: for those of you who think it's been forever since
Speaker 1: the American Revolution or something like that, it is such
Speaker 1: a tiny blip. Modern history is such a tiny blip
Speaker 1: humans who really dwarfs the modern age. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's essentially the time period we're talking about, and during
Speaker 1: that time the ancient Egyptians demonstrated their expertise of a
Speaker 1: number of general and highly specialized categories and skills. They
Speaker 1: were accomplished farmers and engineers. They were artists and linguists.
Speaker 1: They were soldiers, they were astrologers, they were doctors, and
Speaker 1: much more. I mean, everyone knows about the Pyramids and
Speaker 1: areous architectural marvel marvels that survived this day. Everyone knows
Speaker 1: about the rich history of mummification, which we've talked about
Speaker 1: here on the show before, but there other stuff just
Speaker 1: continues continually fascinates me when I read about it. For instance,
Speaker 1: to find out that ancient Egyptians perform surgical skin graphs
Speaker 1: as early as eight hundred BC UM and uh, indeed,
Speaker 1: as we're discussing in this episode, that they practice uh
Speaker 1: the earliest known examples of apriculture. Okay, well, once Egyptian
Speaker 1: civilization is underway, once we've got our our dynasties and
Speaker 1: our organized hierarchical civilization and culture, we we should look
Speaker 1: at the role bees and honey played in that. And
Speaker 1: one of the first things I think we can observe
Speaker 1: is that there is a glyph in the ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: hieroglyphic language. It's one of their symbols, that's a honey bee.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, it's um. It shows up in some
Speaker 1: of the earliest examples of ancient Egyptian writing. UM. In fact,
Speaker 1: we we see it in use by the Old Kingdom
Speaker 1: that's h D seven through. And we probably shouldn't try
Speaker 1: to get too much into talking about the different ages
Speaker 1: froch in Egypt, but essentially there's an Old Kingdom that
Speaker 1: goes on for a long time with many Pharaonic dynasties,
Speaker 1: and then there's an intermediate period that's sort of like
Speaker 1: a Dark Age, and then there is a Middle Kingdom,
Speaker 1: and then there's another break in that there's another intermediate period,
Speaker 1: and then there's a new Kingdom, and then of course
Speaker 1: there's the Greco Roman period. But but essentially coming into
Speaker 1: the Middle Age. Yeah, but but essentially at this point,
Speaker 1: just think of this that the Great Pyramid and the
Speaker 1: Sphinx are there, they're relatively newly constructed, and there's evidence
Speaker 1: already that the Egyptians had at that point uh mastered
Speaker 1: to some degree beekeeping and we're producing honey Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: according to um to Kritsky, here there's evidence from around
Speaker 1: this point that you actually had a a row in
Speaker 1: the in the governmental structure known as the seiler of honey.
Speaker 1: There's an individual who was the seiler of honey, and
Speaker 1: this at least suggests either very organized honey hunting or
Speaker 1: quite possibly the beginnings of industrialized um beekeeping. You know,
Speaker 1: I love this title that you see throughout ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: The seiler. Yeah, the person who seals and that that
Speaker 1: abuse an authority. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of
Speaker 1: our our recent episode on the INCA, and we talked
Speaker 1: about the importance within a government, with importance within an empire,
Speaker 1: of of having a way to of course record uh,
Speaker 1: you know, amounts when it comes to goods, the the
Speaker 1: price of goods, the exchange of goods, and then also
Speaker 1: being able to to seal it and say this is
Speaker 1: what is contained within and uh and someone is accountable
Speaker 1: for it. Yeah. It's a very wonderful physical metaphor for
Speaker 1: having the final word on something. But so we do
Speaker 1: see in ancient in Egypt the evidence of the first
Speaker 1: organized beekeeping, right. Yeah. The The current earliest known evidence
Speaker 1: takes this uh to uh around UH hundred and thirteen
Speaker 1: d c E and specifically, it takes us to the
Speaker 1: solar temple chasap be Brick. So what we have here
Speaker 1: within the ruins of this solar temple, that's again it's
Speaker 1: it's devoted to to ray. We see decorative color reliefs
Speaker 1: that show off scenes of desert wildlife, boating and beep keeping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's got these different vignettes that actually showed the stage.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not just sort of like a cartoon like, oh,
Speaker 1: here are some people beekeeping it. It's sort of, uh, comprehensive.
Speaker 1: It shows the different steps you take in order to
Speaker 1: do the main jobs of a beekeeper. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: there's a certain amount of interpretation that has to take
Speaker 1: place in figuring out exactly what they're showing and exactly
Speaker 1: what those of vignettes are showing. They especially because some
Speaker 1: part of it are missing. Yeah, some parts are missing
Speaker 1: androw damage and uh and depending on what's going on there,
Speaker 1: you know that that ends up impacting our understanding of
Speaker 1: exactly how advanced they were. So for instance, that there's
Speaker 1: one of the vignettes in particular represents a man either
Speaker 1: using a smoker to control the bees or he's calling
Speaker 1: a queen to enter a jug. Now, either one of
Speaker 1: those options is very interesting, and we should talk about
Speaker 1: what that actually means. To to smoke the bees or
Speaker 1: to call the queen. Yeah, the smoking thing. I think
Speaker 1: most people are familiar with this because if you've seen
Speaker 1: any footage or just or even just in the course
Speaker 1: of your life, if you've seen beekeeping, you've probably seen
Speaker 1: people using a smoker because the smoke, uh, calms the bees.
Speaker 1: That's a nice way. It's a nice way of putting it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's a weapon you get to use
Speaker 1: against the bees so you can pill with their goods.
Speaker 1: It's like saying tear gas calms the crowd. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it works. And when you try and figure out
Speaker 1: exactly how this came about, you know, who knows. Somebody
Speaker 1: was getting stung by bees and they leveled their torch
Speaker 1: at them and they noticed the smoke helped. Or perhaps
Speaker 1: one was making a burnt offering, and they found that
Speaker 1: the incense, Uh, the smoke from the incense calmed the bees. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a couple of different ends there. Now.
Speaker 1: The calling is also a fascinating possibility. Whichever one he's
Speaker 1: doing here. If he's calling it seems to be that
Speaker 1: he's got to bee hive up to his face and
Speaker 1: he's making sounds with his mouth into the beehive to
Speaker 1: get the bees to do something, which which is just amazing. Now,
Speaker 1: how exactly would this work? What would he be doing? Well,
Speaker 1: it's known as is piping, and uh, it's it's a
Speaker 1: very real thing, and it's also still practiced in some
Speaker 1: beekeeping traditions, especially in Egypt to this day. Like even
Speaker 1: despite all that has fallen away from ancient Egypt and
Speaker 1: modern Egyptian culture, you still see some of these traditional
Speaker 1: beekeeping practices that are utilized there. So essentially what's happening
Speaker 1: here is a bee keeper mimics the queen's audible communication.
Speaker 1: So the queen is pushing her thorax against the honeycomb
Speaker 1: and vibrating her wing muscles without moving her wings. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it creates this um. It's a it's a a
Speaker 1: a long tone followed by a series of short burst
Speaker 1: and I've heard it described as zeep, zeep, zeep. There's
Speaker 1: also a cack cack, yeah right, yeah, yeah, So they're
Speaker 1: there are different tones that the bees make to one
Speaker 1: another to communicate, to signal. Essentially, what they need to
Speaker 1: do in the next stage of a reproductive process, like
Speaker 1: if a if a young queen is within the nest
Speaker 1: right and specifically here, my understanding is that what the
Speaker 1: the bee caller is doing is creating the sound of
Speaker 1: an emergent virgin queen, and then that would cause the
Speaker 1: existing monarch or another emergent queen to come forward and
Speaker 1: fight herr and try to kill her. Uh calling her out? Yeah,
Speaker 1: calling her out. So you're you're manipulating the bees speaking
Speaker 1: their language in order to draw the queen away so
Speaker 1: that you can put her in a bottle, move her
Speaker 1: to another hive, and use her presence to manipulate the
Speaker 1: uh your creation of new hives or just moving the
Speaker 1: existing hive. Yeah. So just the idea of of a
Speaker 1: human being able to make bee sounds to talk to
Speaker 1: the bees is fascinating on its own. Also that they
Speaker 1: figured this out in ancient Egypt, but there are other
Speaker 1: techniques displayed at Newer Sara in these solar temple as well. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's another vignette that seems like it shows a man
Speaker 1: pouring something from a spout. So this might be honey
Speaker 1: taken from the hive. It might be honey that's just
Speaker 1: separated from the wax. They might be deluding it. Um,
Speaker 1: we're deluding the honey honey with water. And I remember
Speaker 1: reading in Krinsky's book that that that some have commented
Speaker 1: on this and thought, well, maybe they were making meat
Speaker 1: or something. Um, you know, because you can of course
Speaker 1: take honey and create an alcoholic average from it. But
Speaker 1: there's apparently no real evidence that that's what was actually
Speaker 1: taking place here. Though they apparently did add honey, perhaps
Speaker 1: in deluded form, to their alcohol. Yeah, so they sweetened
Speaker 1: wine or beer with it, but they didn't make meat
Speaker 1: as far as we know. As far as we know. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: looking at these vignettes, I wanted to observe something that
Speaker 1: struck me as quite strange. Throughout this book and so
Speaker 1: meaning throughout ancient Egypt, there are lots of pictures of bees.
Speaker 1: I mean, this makes sense because we have this b glyph,
Speaker 1: this standard be illustration that's part of the hieroglyphic language,
Speaker 1: you know, the written language system. But they're also all
Speaker 1: these illustrations of bees that appear in vignettes and carvings
Speaker 1: throughout ancient Egypt, depicting a swarm of bees or a
Speaker 1: bee next to a jar showing that the jar has
Speaker 1: honey in it, or in these beekeeping scenes, and I
Speaker 1: noticed very often it looks to me like these bees
Speaker 1: do not have a correct number of legs. Indeed, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I feel like I don't want to be pedantic here,
Speaker 1: but often you see the bees with four legs, or
Speaker 1: you see them with three legs. I can understand the
Speaker 1: three legs, because we know insects have six legs. The
Speaker 1: three legs maybe you're just seeing one side of the bee,
Speaker 1: so each leg stands for a pair. But the ones
Speaker 1: where it shows four legs or maybe five legs, like
Speaker 1: four forward legs and one back legs sticking out, those
Speaker 1: are strange to me, especially since there's like no animal
Speaker 1: on earth that has an odd number of legs. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this four legged ancient be sort of it rang a
Speaker 1: bell vaguely in the back of my mind, and I
Speaker 1: was like, where do I know that concept from before?
Speaker 1: And it was it was it was saying to me
Speaker 1: go back to Sunday school. So I did. I checked
Speaker 1: it out. I looked in the Bible, and bingo in
Speaker 1: the Bible, in in the the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus
Speaker 1: eleven twenty to twenty three, we read about four legged
Speaker 1: insects in a part of the Ancient Hebrew dietary restrictions.
Speaker 1: So I just want to read this selection of Leviticus
Speaker 1: from the New American Standard translations. Is this is referring
Speaker 1: to which insects that are are kosher, Yeah, which you
Speaker 1: can and can't eat? And so the translation reads like this,
Speaker 1: all the winged insects that walk on all fours are
Speaker 1: detestable to you. Yet these you may eat. Among the
Speaker 1: winged insects which walk on all fours, those which have
Speaker 1: above their feet jointed legs with which to jump on
Speaker 1: the earth. These of them you may eat. The locust
Speaker 1: and its kinds, and the devastating locusts and its kinds,
Speaker 1: and the cricket in its kinds, and the grasshopper in
Speaker 1: its kinds. But all other winged insects which are four footed,
Speaker 1: are detestable to you. Now, obviously I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: like hammer these ancient people, like what a bunch of dummies.
Speaker 1: I mean, they weren't dummies. You wouldn't expect either the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian artists who created the solar temple carving, or
Speaker 1: any of these other carvings and illustrations. Uh, Nor would
Speaker 1: you expect the Jewish author who wrote this part of
Speaker 1: Leviticus to be kind of entomologists studying bees up close
Speaker 1: and locusts to see how many legs they have. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a division in Egyptian society, and the individuals who
Speaker 1: are who are keeping the bees are probably separate from
Speaker 1: those that are actually carving the hieroglyphics. Yeah. So I'm
Speaker 1: certainly not saying that they're stupid. They should have known better,
Speaker 1: But but it just did seem like an interesting coincidence
Speaker 1: that multiple ancient people's would get this wrong. And also,
Speaker 1: as I kept reading in the book, I came across
Speaker 1: more art that depicted bees this way is on this
Speaker 1: Old Kingdom seal amulet, on a Middle Kingdom Scarab carving,
Speaker 1: And so it just made me wonder, is there a
Speaker 1: widespread belief in the ancient Near East that insects had
Speaker 1: four legs? Well, you know, after you brought this to
Speaker 1: my attention, I was looking around a little about it,
Speaker 1: and certainly there's there's a lot of just pointless information
Speaker 1: out there, with people either using this as as an
Speaker 1: argument against religion and against the Bible saying, Hey, they
Speaker 1: got the number of legs on a on a on
Speaker 1: a asshopper. Long, how wrong? How can you trust anything? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I read in Food and Culture a Reader by Carol
Speaker 1: Counahan and Penny than Estric that that possibly the I mean,
Speaker 1: the biblical distinction here is more about insects that walk
Speaker 1: versus those that that fly, or at least kind of
Speaker 1: have that live in that area between true flight and
Speaker 1: uh and walking. So in that case, it would be
Speaker 1: saying something like the saying having four legs or going
Speaker 1: on all fours, which the Bible passage says, in which
Speaker 1: these b images indicate it's not really about counting the
Speaker 1: number of legs. It's more just kind of like this
Speaker 1: is in the category of things that crawl, right, that
Speaker 1: it's a land animal and that but bees fly. Bees fly,
Speaker 1: so they're okay. So it's more like saying, don't eat
Speaker 1: that the insect land animals. But then then another thing
Speaker 1: that comes to mind here is just the law of
Speaker 1: conservation of detail, which is the reason that everybody in
Speaker 1: the Simpsons would only have four digits on each hand,
Speaker 1: and why you do see a number of bees and
Speaker 1: other insects and cartoons that have the wrong number of limbs,
Speaker 1: because ultimately, when you're recreating these things that on a smaller,
Speaker 1: unreal scale, you are forced to to use an inaccurate
Speaker 1: number of limbs or digits. Oh well, that seems like
Speaker 1: a very logical explanation to me, especially for the the
Speaker 1: illustrations of the bees. Yeah, and certainly worth remembering for
Speaker 1: future alien civilizations that come to our plan and try
Speaker 1: and figure out the Simpsons what is what are they
Speaker 1: trying to tell us? What? What is with the fingers?
Speaker 1: So um, it's first of all, it's it's interesting to
Speaker 1: just discuss the importance of of honey as a trade good.
Speaker 1: I was really fascinated by this, uh, because it's it's
Speaker 1: Critsky points out Egyptian societies didn't a society didn't really
Speaker 1: have a currency. I mean they sort of didn't. They
Speaker 1: didn't have a physical currency, had like they had an
Speaker 1: ideal currency which they would use to Essentially, the way
Speaker 1: it worked is you had a measure of a certain metal,
Speaker 1: like copper, and then you would have certain quantities of
Speaker 1: that copper, but you wouldn't actually hold the copper in
Speaker 1: your hand. So if you were owed, for example, five debans,
Speaker 1: of copper. You would be paid five debans of copper
Speaker 1: worth of grain or something like that. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: would be there would also be cases where if you
Speaker 1: were supposed to pay or be paid in grain and
Speaker 1: they did not have the grain, you might pay in honey.
Speaker 1: So honey in a in a sense was the currency.
Speaker 1: But and it was valuable for what I understand, and
Speaker 1: that value would go up and down, but it was
Speaker 1: it was a valuable commodity. It wasn't something that everybody
Speaker 1: beating all the time. It was sort of a luxury
Speaker 1: food item. Yeah, a luxury food item as well as
Speaker 1: we'll discuss an item that is that is utilized in
Speaker 1: medicine and magic. So you're saying honey was money, Yeah,
Speaker 1: honey was money. And since honey was money, honey was
Speaker 1: of course also an industry, a state run industry. Um
Speaker 1: that they were the edge of ancient Egyptians where a
Speaker 1: civil organization, and that's how they that's how they built
Speaker 1: their wonders, that's how they made their honey. They had
Speaker 1: a system of beekeepers, overseers, overseers too to look over
Speaker 1: those overseers. They're just a whole um you know, system, uh,
Speaker 1: to regulate the production of honey and then ultimately the
Speaker 1: trade of honey with other with other cultures. But of
Speaker 1: course the honey also had a great spiritual significance within
Speaker 1: Egyptian religion and their their their priesthood and their mythology. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we we already talked about the tears of ray.
Speaker 1: The bee is the tear of ray, and the sun
Speaker 1: god cries and his his tears become a gift to
Speaker 1: us that gives us this sweet, sweet food. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is uh, it is the the product of a of
Speaker 1: a holy animal to the ancient Egyptians and certainly too.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's golden, It glistens when the sunlight hits it.
Speaker 1: It appears to close. You can you can easily imagine
Speaker 1: just carrying a little of your your symbolic, magical understanding
Speaker 1: of the world into your your contemplation of honey. It's
Speaker 1: just it's this, this potent, perfect thing. Now. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the ancient world, we often see an association between
Speaker 1: healing and religious ritual. That it's very likely in an
Speaker 1: ancient culture that you might find the medicines and the
Speaker 1: doctors sort of overlapping with the priesthood and the sacred
Speaker 1: rights that there wasn't always so much of a distinction
Speaker 1: between science based medicine and magic based medicine. And you
Speaker 1: certainly see that come through with honey, because honey actually
Speaker 1: does have known medical uses that are truly effective. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was also used as a you know, a sort
Speaker 1: of functional medicine, but also as a magical medicine in
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt. That's right. Yeah, I mean we're in a
Speaker 1: we're in a city suation where the best minds are
Speaker 1: using the materials at hand to try and treat injuries
Speaker 1: and disease. Some of it is working, some of it
Speaker 1: is sort of working, some of it's not working, but
Speaker 1: maybe it seems to work, and some of it just
Speaker 1: feels right within the uh uh, you know, the framework
Speaker 1: of their worldview. So it's interesting that Egyptian physicians who
Speaker 1: were at the time were considered some of the best
Speaker 1: in the world. Like this was again in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: You found skin drafts taking place. Um. So, an Egyptian
Speaker 1: physician would treat a wound, but they would also give
Speaker 1: you a wax amulet to burn. Uh. And and this
Speaker 1: is key because because because you take the wax, all right,
Speaker 1: you make a candle from the wax or just this amulet,
Speaker 1: and when it burns, it burns up brightly, and it
Speaker 1: burns up completely. So symbolically and by extension magically, it
Speaker 1: consumes the illness, burning completely. Mean there's no ash left,
Speaker 1: no ash at all. I mean, so there's this almost
Speaker 1: a magical quality to that. You'd expect ash from all
Speaker 1: of the other burning you do in your normal life.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all burn a lot of things, but
Speaker 1: there's always some evidence left behind. If you can burn
Speaker 1: this wax figuring up completely, something does seem very otherworldly
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, and you burn it. You burn this
Speaker 1: thing that is made from this substance that comes from
Speaker 1: the creature that in turn came from the God of
Speaker 1: the sign. Now, speaking of the sacred or religious aspects,
Speaker 1: I couldn't pardon me this indulgence, but I could not
Speaker 1: help but notice that sort of understanding. The science behind
Speaker 1: the emergence of beekeeping is to see the biological evolution
Speaker 1: of a trinity between three organisms. So you've got your
Speaker 1: auto trophes, your pollinators, and your domesticators. The auto trophes
Speaker 1: are the plants, you know, These are the creators of
Speaker 1: the energy in this chain, and they create nectar from sunlight,
Speaker 1: so they turned the sunlight photo energy into sugar. Then
Speaker 1: the pollinators, the bees in a way or sort of
Speaker 1: the redeemers, they convert this, uh, this scant nectar that
Speaker 1: the plants produce through a process of sacred barfing, into
Speaker 1: very highly concentrated and prized, valuable honey. And then of
Speaker 1: course the domesticators, which are the human beekeepers are I
Speaker 1: would think of them sort of as like the order
Speaker 1: the logos that holds this whole system in place. And
Speaker 1: in biological terms, it's a three way symbiosis. It's three
Speaker 1: ways that organisms are all interacting and all benefiting from
Speaker 1: the system. And in terms of the religious context, you've
Speaker 1: got this trinity. And I was just trying to think
Speaker 1: of other cases in the natural world where we see
Speaker 1: domestication taking this form of a three way symbiosis. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: like grass converts sunlight into chemical energy and then our
Speaker 1: cattle eat that. But I don't know if you'd say
Speaker 1: that symbiotic for the grass, like does the grass benefit
Speaker 1: from being eaten by cattle in the same way that
Speaker 1: the plants benefit from being pollinated by the bees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was I was trying to think of any other
Speaker 1: examples earlier. And you know, I think you can sort
Speaker 1: of stretch it and apply it to to to other organisms.
Speaker 1: But it it's it's hard to think of an example
Speaker 1: where it applies so perfectly and so, you know, just
Speaker 1: so you know, symbolically. But anyway, let's get back to
Speaker 1: bees wax and some some ancient apicultural voodoo. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so um yeah, So they're using bees wax for a
Speaker 1: number of things, not just magical. They're using it as
Speaker 1: an adhesive, they're using it as an embalming agent, a
Speaker 1: light source in the form of candles, and artistic medium. Um.
Speaker 1: But but magic is where it really shines. So it's
Speaker 1: it's malleable, it doesn't break down in water, it doesn't
Speaker 1: discolor unless you put it out in the sun. And
Speaker 1: that actually makes perfect and it makes it work perfectly
Speaker 1: within their magical thinking, right because the rays of ray
Speaker 1: will actually change the color of the sacred sculpture. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it also doesn't lose its shape after being molded
Speaker 1: into its does are forms a wax figures uh that
Speaker 1: last for centuries when they are actually stored away. One
Speaker 1: of the problems here is that since so many of
Speaker 1: these wax figures from from the Egyptians. They were made
Speaker 1: to burn, so a lot of them were burned. So
Speaker 1: you know, you you find some in tombs here and there,
Speaker 1: but but you know, but but certainly the vast majority
Speaker 1: of of the the amulets and statuettes that were created
Speaker 1: were consumed by fire. It's it's the same reason that
Speaker 1: a future generations of archaeologists aren't going to find all
Speaker 1: that many intact pinatas to study from our culture exactly.
Speaker 1: So there are a few different different accounts that that
Speaker 1: that Kritsky rolls through that that that help help us
Speaker 1: understand the use of these wax uh magical icons. So
Speaker 1: the Salt Papyrus, that's the one that that original quote
Speaker 1: was from about the Tears of Ray. It describes how
Speaker 1: wax quote could be used to ensure the destroy aduction
Speaker 1: of Seth, the god of confusion, disorder and violence and
Speaker 1: the murderer of Osiris unquote. So simply you'd make a
Speaker 1: bees wax likeness of your enemy and you burn them
Speaker 1: to quote kill the name of Seth. That is too cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like I want to do that right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that this principle is just too good. And and it
Speaker 1: doesn't just work for destruction. It can work multiple ways.
Speaker 1: You might say the wax magic go. It's a two
Speaker 1: way street. Because there's one great story in the Tears
Speaker 1: of Ray also that that recounts the Twelfth Dynasty myth
Speaker 1: of a priest named web b Owner, not Webinar but
Speaker 1: web Owner. Yeah, I ket I kept reading it my
Speaker 1: head his webinar to who and like, like webinars, this
Speaker 1: guy has some nefarious intentions. He makes a wax crocodile
Speaker 1: and then he throws it into a pond where his
Speaker 1: wife's lover is having a nice bath. And then the
Speaker 1: wax cry goodile comes to life, eats the person, and
Speaker 1: then vanishes. And then the priest comes back and can
Speaker 1: summon the crocodile from the pond and turn it back
Speaker 1: into wax. Yeah, And he does so in the presence
Speaker 1: of the Pharaoh. And then the Pharaoh observes this and
Speaker 1: says uh. And after after observing this magic, says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you're right, there's the lover right there. Um. Oh wait, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he turned sentenced him to death. Sorry we should
Speaker 1: have said. He turns it back into wax, and that
Speaker 1: what it It vomits up the lover. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: then the pharaoh says, well, there's the lover. Your story
Speaker 1: checks out. I sentenced him to death. And so then, uh,
Speaker 1: the priest here turns the wax crocodile back into a
Speaker 1: real crocodile. It eats the lover and this time vanishes
Speaker 1: for good into the water. So that that is a
Speaker 1: great myth. That is awesome. Yeah, I love it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you have you have statues becoming real creatures and then
Speaker 1: turning back into statues, and it's uh, it's it's a
Speaker 1: fun one. In addition to these stories, though again, we
Speaker 1: do find wax amulets, including as offering tables, winged sun discs,
Speaker 1: uh tiets which are isis symbols, and collars. Also animals,
Speaker 1: such as one of a hippo, which it said can
Speaker 1: can be destroyed in order to slaughter an actual hippo.
Speaker 1: What you can burn the wax hippo to kill the
Speaker 1: real hip. Yeah, some more of this, the symbolic magic
Speaker 1: of burning the uh the likeness in order to harm
Speaker 1: or destroy the actual thing. You wonder how ideas like
Speaker 1: that persisted, if they if they have a guarantee. I
Speaker 1: feel like some some ambiguity had to be built into it,
Speaker 1: because otherwise people would kind of observe that they were
Speaker 1: burning wax hippos and not killing their hippo every time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it had to you would probably something you
Speaker 1: would do in addition to taking direct physical action against
Speaker 1: the hippo. Oh, I can see that. Yeah, like it
Speaker 1: increases your chances of defeating the hippo with the spear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's because there's also a thirteenth dynasty myth that alleges
Speaker 1: that the pharaoh neck and Ebo used rituals and tailing
Speaker 1: little wax ships to secure victories against the Persians. And
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of additional data there, but I
Speaker 1: can either imagine it a as a as a ritual
Speaker 1: that's carried out in addition to military action as a
Speaker 1: way to sort of bless your military action, or I
Speaker 1: couldn't In the back of my mind, I couldn't help
Speaker 1: but think, well, maybe this guy just had like wax
Speaker 1: models of his units and it was like war gaming
Speaker 1: it out on the table before him, and perhaps maybe
Speaker 1: an onlooker thought, hey, he's practicing magic here. Clearly he's
Speaker 1: using little likenesses of the ships in order to magically
Speaker 1: secure victory. Well, there there is a lot of ambiguity,
Speaker 1: as we've been saying, between functional uses and magical uses,
Speaker 1: and this definitely comes through as as we mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: in medicine, because like we said, they do use honey
Speaker 1: for a lot of medical practices, honey and bees wax both. Yeah,
Speaker 1: apparently they're they're over five hundred documented uh prescriptions that
Speaker 1: use honey and um. A lot of times it's just
Speaker 1: about making the thing that you're eating more palatable. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
Speaker 1: That's not to be discounted. I mean, that is legitimate
Speaker 1: medical technology if it eases the if it eases the
Speaker 1: application of a medicine, and in other times it is
Speaker 1: you know, an active ingredient in the medication. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: is one thing I had to relate from the book
Speaker 1: that talks about how the The Ever's Papyrus, you know,
Speaker 1: it's famous papyrus from ancient Egypt describes several ways of
Speaker 1: treating constipation, which it calls quote to open the belly,
Speaker 1: which I don't know when I pictured that, I see,
Speaker 1: uh what it is described in Jurassic Park that the
Speaker 1: velociraptor does with its claw, you know, split spills your
Speaker 1: intestines out everywhere. But no, this this is the cure constipation.
Speaker 1: So one of the cures it offers for constipation is this.
Speaker 1: You get some milk, you get some honey, and you
Speaker 1: get watched sycamore figs. Then you boil that mix you're down,
Speaker 1: and then you run it through a strainer and then
Speaker 1: you drink this for four days. And apparently it worked
Speaker 1: pretty well at curing constipation. But it worked a little
Speaker 1: too well because some patients had their constipation so decisively
Speaker 1: cured that they ended up with a pro lapsed anus. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so what do you do to help this poor
Speaker 1: patient that now has a pro lapsed anus. Well, you
Speaker 1: mix up a bomb of salt, oil and honey and
Speaker 1: then you apply directly to the anus for another four days.
Speaker 1: So again the use of honey. The honey makes the
Speaker 1: anus go out. The honey makes the anus come back in,
Speaker 1: or maybe it doesn't make it come back in, but
Speaker 1: maybe just eases some of the discomfort you and it
Speaker 1: it's certainly it's we Even modern studies have documented the
Speaker 1: use of of honey as a way to to treat
Speaker 1: cuts and burns to alleviate the symptoms in the pain
Speaker 1: they're in. Yeah, it has legitimate medical potential. Yeah, as um,
Speaker 1: as Critsky points out in his book, it has osmotic potential.
Speaker 1: So it's you know, it's this this viscous um substance.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of liquid in there, so it
Speaker 1: can actually suck the fluid out of bacteria and in
Speaker 1: doing so less than bacterial infections. I mean, honey has
Speaker 1: natural antimicrobial properties. Yeah. Um. I think part of this
Speaker 1: is just due to its pH right as low pH,
Speaker 1: meaning it's acidic, but it also has other chemical properties
Speaker 1: that's right. Um. Anti microbial activity in most honeyes is
Speaker 1: due to the enzomatic production of hydrogen peroxi. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the fizzy stuff. And I mean additionally to you're you're
Speaker 1: putting honey on a wound, it it can it can maintain,
Speaker 1: it maintains a moist wound condition. That high viscosity helps
Speaker 1: to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. If your
Speaker 1: wound is caked in honey. Uh, nothing's necessarily going to
Speaker 1: get through that that honey layer on top. As delicious
Speaker 1: as it may say, you and uh, you know in
Speaker 1: many reports, Um, there are many reports out there of
Speaker 1: of of honey being used very effectively as addressing for wounds, burns,
Speaker 1: skin ulcers, and inflammations. Uh. With the the antibacterial properties
Speaker 1: of honey speeding up the growth of new tissue to
Speaker 1: heal the wound. Studies have actually found that that honey
Speaker 1: can reduce healing times in patients suffering mild to moderate
Speaker 1: burn wounds. That's cool, yeah, But of course, getting back
Speaker 1: to the ancient world, the Ebers Papyrus also has some
Speaker 1: other recommendations. Yes, it does prescribe honey for treating urinary
Speaker 1: problems if you p too much or if it hurts
Speaker 1: when you do. Mixtures containing honey were recommended. I don't
Speaker 1: know to what extent that actually would have been effective,
Speaker 1: or if it was, if the honey was what was
Speaker 1: responsible for it. But the honey also was used in
Speaker 1: a mixture of some genuinely gross sounding prophylactic devices for contraception.
Speaker 1: Other ingredients were things like crocodile feces and sour milk,
Speaker 1: and essentially it's a female condom aid. Out of this
Speaker 1: the grossest combination of substances you can find, but included honey.
Speaker 1: Um and uh, and I know Chrisky points out that
Speaker 1: it's possible some studies have suggested that the sour milk
Speaker 1: could have actually had spermicidal properties to it, so this
Speaker 1: may have been partially effective. But this is not a
Speaker 1: recommendation that you try any of these mixtures at home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't do not do not try this at home. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, of course, in talking about all of this too,
Speaker 1: the placebo effect has to be huge too, because we've
Speaker 1: discussed how that this sort of Uh. I think you've
Speaker 1: brought it up that the something happened scenario, right, you
Speaker 1: felt something right, uh? In in this case, it could
Speaker 1: just be that's the sweet sensation of of tasting honey. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've actually mentioned before this is something that comes up
Speaker 1: a lot. And on another podcast I listened to sometimes
Speaker 1: called Sawbones, Yeah, where they talk about weird applications of
Speaker 1: medicine throughout history. In fact, my wife Rachel told me
Speaker 1: that they have an episode on honey. I haven't had
Speaker 1: a chance to listen to it, but which should We
Speaker 1: should check that out indeed, Um, yeah, I would love
Speaker 1: to hear because I I know of of a few
Speaker 1: other uses of honey. Uh. In in medicine that are
Speaker 1: kind of strange. But I would love to hear a
Speaker 1: complete overall examination of different cultures in their use of honey. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and those guys are always pretty funny, so that
Speaker 1: should be a good one, alright. So we have talked
Speaker 1: about the healing power of honey, the magical use of honey,
Speaker 1: the bee keeping techniques that the ancient Egyptians seemed to
Speaker 1: utilize to get the honey and the wax from the bees,
Speaker 1: and before that we talked about the way the bees
Speaker 1: produce honey to begin with, and why they evolved into
Speaker 1: this curious state. I really am fascinated by the emergence
Speaker 1: of apriculture as as just one incarnation of agriculture and
Speaker 1: the domestication of animals as a technology in human history,
Speaker 1: because I think this is often overlooked when thinking about
Speaker 1: what technology is. I think of technology these days and
Speaker 1: I just think of electronics, and I always have to
Speaker 1: remember to broaden my mind, and and if I try
Speaker 1: to broaden my mind, I go from electronics to other
Speaker 1: mechanical inanimate objects that we use as tools to accomplish
Speaker 1: goals in smart ways. But it really shouldn't even just
Speaker 1: be inanimate objects, because really the control of other living
Speaker 1: organisms to accomplish goals should be thought of as a technology.
Speaker 1: And I think this is one of the most complex
Speaker 1: and fascinating ones that we have, that we've created a
Speaker 1: relationship with a symbiotic relationship in nature that already exists
Speaker 1: between flowers and bees and made it work to our advantage.
Speaker 1: There's something very beautiful and very weird about that. If
Speaker 1: you can just step back for a moment and look
Speaker 1: at this as an alien, would uh that we keep
Speaker 1: insects in containers that fertilize the plants that grow all
Speaker 1: over the earth and make sweet food and medicine for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy and it's uh and indeed it is a
Speaker 1: true technology, and it's one that, like like the Pyramids,
Speaker 1: has stood the test of times. As Kritsky points out,
Speaker 1: you can you can find traditional Egyptian beekeepers to this
Speaker 1: day that are using some of the same techniques that
Speaker 1: that that would have been used in ancient times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this is just one more example of
Speaker 1: something that I think is sort of a recent theme
Speaker 1: on this show. Something we like to talk about that
Speaker 1: um that that ancient cultures or cultures that are pre
Speaker 1: modern technology, before electronics, before uh, you know, steam powered
Speaker 1: industry or anything like that. We're not stupid. I think
Speaker 1: it's easy for people to think, oh, they didn't have
Speaker 1: any of the technology we have, they must have been dumb.
Speaker 1: They weren't at all. They were amazingly clever. I think,
Speaker 1: in many ways, probably more clever than us because they
Speaker 1: didn't have as much easy uh they did. They didn't
Speaker 1: have an easy foothold like we did to make new advances.
Speaker 1: So they were working with what they had and and
Speaker 1: when you see the innovations they came up with, it's astounding. Indeed.
Speaker 1: So hey, let's go ahead and get mr Kritsky on
Speaker 1: the phone here and we will ask him just a
Speaker 1: few follow up questions about his book, The Tears of Ray.
Speaker 1: All right, Professor Chritsky, thank you for joining us here
Speaker 1: on the podcast to discuss your excellent book, The Tears
Speaker 1: of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: Robert and I both really enjoyed this book, so thank
Speaker 1: you for writing it. In addition to thank you for
Speaker 1: joining us, well, thank you very much. It's a it's
Speaker 1: great to be here. So just to kick things off
Speaker 1: of how did you first become interested in ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: bee keeping. Oh, I've been a frustrated historian for many,
Speaker 1: many years. And uh, my my interest in egyptology and
Speaker 1: and insects salt sort of happened about the same time
Speaker 1: in my early teen years living in Miami, Florida, and uh,
Speaker 1: I remember walking home uh and seeing a hy i'ld
Speaker 1: nest of honeycomb that had fallen on the ground, and
Speaker 1: I collected out all the uh the bees and put
Speaker 1: them into I was a nerd. I put them in
Speaker 1: test tubes and took him up into my room and
Speaker 1: watched them develop, and ended taking to the school and
Speaker 1: they had him on display for several days. And that
Speaker 1: got my interest in honey bees. My interest in egypology
Speaker 1: happened a few weeks later. I was going to a
Speaker 1: parochial institution that was a very creationist in his orientation,
Speaker 1: and they started talking about Noah's flood and Usher's chronology
Speaker 1: and said that, uh, the flood occurred in b C.
Speaker 1: And that seemed kind of interesting to me because I've
Speaker 1: seen dates that pertained to each colleges seemed older. So
Speaker 1: I looked went and started reading books on on ancient
Speaker 1: East but it found that the Pyramids brot five years
Speaker 1: before the flood and that it was a real, uh,
Speaker 1: real enlightening experience. Like, am I the only one that's
Speaker 1: seen this? You know, must have built them very sturdy?
Speaker 1: Oh that's right, that you know, the flood that created that,
Speaker 1: that that carved out the Grand Canyon didn't destroy the Pyramids.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that that that really got me going. And
Speaker 1: but I also got fascinated with Egyptology at that time,
Speaker 1: and even even while I was working at my PhD
Speaker 1: in entomology. I remember that was when the King Tut
Speaker 1: exhibit what I was touring for the first time in
Speaker 1: the late seventies and going to the Egyptology section at
Speaker 1: the University of Illinois Library and just sitting on the
Speaker 1: floor and pulling off every volume one after the other
Speaker 1: looking for any kind of insect association and insect reference.
Speaker 1: And that's how it started, uh, wanting to sort of
Speaker 1: annoy my high school teachers and then getting caught up
Speaker 1: in the King Tut craze. That was when Steve Martin
Speaker 1: did that wonderful song on Saturday Night Live, so it
Speaker 1: was a way to get caught up in that as well.
Speaker 1: So Dr Krisky, What would you say about how the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian treatment of bee keeping the apriculture technology. Uh,
Speaker 1: what does that reveal about the ancient Egyptian culture? What
Speaker 1: what does their technology say about who these people were
Speaker 1: and what they believe? Well, the the aspect of course,
Speaker 1: the title of the book is the Tears of Ray,
Speaker 1: and there is a papyrus from three uh b c.
Speaker 1: Which gives the whole story about what the Egyptians thought,
Speaker 1: uh bees are about. And that that the the statement
Speaker 1: that's in this papyrus UH that wrote UH that the
Speaker 1: god Ray wept and the tears from his eyes fell
Speaker 1: on the ground and turned into a bee. And the
Speaker 1: bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers
Speaker 1: of every plant. And so wax was made and also
Speaker 1: honey out of the tears of Ray. And so for
Speaker 1: the Egyptians, honey was a gift of the Sun God,
Speaker 1: and that made it very very important to them. Not
Speaker 1: only was an important commodity as those sweetener, it was
Speaker 1: used in medicine, it was used in uh and UH
Speaker 1: the wax was very important and as in medicine as
Speaker 1: well along with honey, but also as a as a
Speaker 1: magical substance. All this came from these these in x
Speaker 1: that were essentially the manifestation of the gods tears, and
Speaker 1: so that that made honey quite valuable from a theological perspective,
Speaker 1: but also from a biological perspective as well. And there
Speaker 1: even in their their temples, the Sun Temple, for example,
Speaker 1: from the fifth dynoce of No Australiani, there's this wonderful
Speaker 1: relief that shows beekeeping. And so here's something that I
Speaker 1: don't I've I've been to a lot of cathedrals and
Speaker 1: temples and churches around the world, and I've not seen
Speaker 1: displays about beekeeping in there. So that puts in a
Speaker 1: whole different perspective. Now, in uh, in your research, am
Speaker 1: I correct in reading that you at one point became
Speaker 1: locked inside of a tomb? Yes, that happened though. That
Speaker 1: was I was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt in the
Speaker 1: early eighties, and uh was I was teaching in Many
Speaker 1: at many A University, about a hundred fifty miles south
Speaker 1: of Cairo, and as part of my research, I was
Speaker 1: I was just visiting archaeological sites to find any kind
Speaker 1: of a sect carving and references to insects and what
Speaker 1: have you visited ninety four archaeological sites, and Uh, I
Speaker 1: was getting so well known in the area that I
Speaker 1: was even asked by members of the Forebay Commission if
Speaker 1: I would meet guests and take them on tours. And
Speaker 1: one instance was the American ambassador to Egypt he Uh.
Speaker 1: He and his wife and their son came down to
Speaker 1: Menua for a tour of the antiquities, and of course
Speaker 1: his excellency was received a government to escort everywhere he
Speaker 1: was going, and and the ambassador's son and I went
Speaker 1: off on our own. And while we were down in
Speaker 1: an underground acropolis, UH, sandstorm blew up and uh they
Speaker 1: grabbed the ambassador and his wife and escorted them to
Speaker 1: the rest house, and UH we weren't there. And I
Speaker 1: was told later that he looked around and said, where's
Speaker 1: my son, and this UH military official responded, he is safe,
Speaker 1: your excellency. He has locked in the tomb. And so,
Speaker 1: of course that we had two guards. We were in
Speaker 1: any real danger. And it wasn't like it was like
Speaker 1: air tight, We're gonna suffocate, because you actually see through
Speaker 1: cracks from the door. So his son and I started
Speaker 1: exploring on our own while we were waiting. We were
Speaker 1: there about forty five minutes and went down one UH
Speaker 1: shaft and found a small UH coffin that would have
Speaker 1: held up mummified ibis bird. We found a crocodile skull.
Speaker 1: There was there was mummy linen everywhere because this was
Speaker 1: such a it was an important underground animal necropolis. So
Speaker 1: it was quite an exciting time. It's one of those
Speaker 1: few things that Uh, I never expected to do, and
Speaker 1: it's something that doesn't happen to a lot of people.
Speaker 1: You know, the mummified animals you mentioned that relates back
Speaker 1: to something I knew you mentioned in the book, but
Speaker 1: I didn't have a time to look up on the
Speaker 1: side as you mentioned the crocodile Apolis, which sounded fascinating
Speaker 1: to me. What's the deal with that crocodile Opolis? Uh.
Speaker 1: That was a city that was prominent during the toll
Speaker 1: Make period later in an ancient uh Egypt. UH and
Speaker 1: UH they were the crocodile god was the god so back,
Speaker 1: and so crocodile Opolis was associated with that deity. And
Speaker 1: the reference in the book talked about feeding crocodiles a
Speaker 1: food that was also laced with with honey. Oh. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you point out in the book,
Speaker 1: and I noticed even before you pointed it out, in
Speaker 1: several of the different artworks and carvings, is the variable
Speaker 1: number of legs in the depictions of bees. Like sometimes
Speaker 1: you would see with apparently three legs, which sort of
Speaker 1: makes sense because it seems like maybe if you're looking
Speaker 1: from one side, each leg could represent a pair. But
Speaker 1: then other times you'd see what looked to me like
Speaker 1: four legs or maybe five legs, depending on how you interpreted,
Speaker 1: one little uh strand coming out the back of the bee.
Speaker 1: And this, this rang a bell in my mind. And
Speaker 1: I remember that there is a passage in the Book
Speaker 1: of Leviticus and Leviticus eleven that talks about winged insects
Speaker 1: with four legs, and I just thought that was a
Speaker 1: kind of strange coincidence. Now, there are obviously a lot
Speaker 1: of ways you might explain a glyph of a bee
Speaker 1: or an illustration of a bee in the ancient world
Speaker 1: having a different number of legs. But do you think
Speaker 1: this was a widespread belief in the ancient Near East
Speaker 1: that there were insects with four legs or is this
Speaker 1: just conservation of detail? Well, and in the case of
Speaker 1: the Egyptian honeybee, the most exact carvings show to be
Speaker 1: having uh four legs oriented forward and then the hind
Speaker 1: leg is actually superimposed on the abdomen, and in some
Speaker 1: instances that wasn't drawn in or was very lightly carved in,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't stand out because it's actually always super
Speaker 1: imposed on the abdomen itself. And uh some on almost
Speaker 1: all cases, you're gonna find evidence that they probably had
Speaker 1: all six legs, but they might not have carved the
Speaker 1: hind leg as detailed enough because of the abdominal structure.
Speaker 1: UH carving that that honeybee hieroglyph was quite variable. I
Speaker 1: have a chapter in the book about about how they
Speaker 1: would go about doing this, and it's all for me.
Speaker 1: It's like doing handwriting analysis if you're gonna do forensic
Speaker 1: handwriting analysis for forgery or have you. And I found
Speaker 1: there were certain certain patterns of existent with certain certain
Speaker 1: bees and certain places of temples, for example. But uh,
Speaker 1: in general, unless if it's a very careful carving, it
Speaker 1: always has evidence of the four legs forward and then
Speaker 1: the hind legs superposed on it, but you wouldn't see
Speaker 1: the other leg on the other side of the ave
Speaker 1: been that case. But so I think you're looking at
Speaker 1: mostly uh not not necessarily being careful for the eye
Speaker 1: of detail. But in some cases these uh uh, these
Speaker 1: details might have slowly uh given away during time through time. Interesting,
Speaker 1: So a question this this is something that that maybe
Speaker 1: didn't come up as much in the book, but it
Speaker 1: kind of relates to some previous episodes that we've we've
Speaker 1: done to the podcast the deal with with with the
Speaker 1: egyptology and animals. Did the ancient Egyptians ever use bees
Speaker 1: as a as a weapon in any sense? I did
Speaker 1: didn't run across any example of honey bees being used
Speaker 1: as a weapon like you would see for example some
Speaker 1: of the uh medieval uh eliminated Mantage scripts and some
Speaker 1: of the references to talk about skep straw bee hives
Speaker 1: being thrown over castle walls for example, to break up
Speaker 1: a siege and things like that. So I did not
Speaker 1: find any evidence of of bees being used as a
Speaker 1: weapon per se. Uh. The difference was in in the
Speaker 1: type of hive Exyptians were using. They were clay tubes.
Speaker 1: They would not stand to a lot of uh trauma
Speaker 1: if you will, uh. They were had fewer bees in
Speaker 1: each one than then we would have an our typical
Speaker 1: modern box. I probably five seven thousand bees as opposed
Speaker 1: to you know, thirty fifty thousand bees in a in
Speaker 1: a tall, multi store, multi boxed lank straw hive. Cool. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so I've got a couple of other ideas. I
Speaker 1: want to see what you think about about the relationship
Speaker 1: between humans and bees and uh and be evolutions. So
Speaker 1: one of the first things I started thinking about in
Speaker 1: this bok is that bee keeping seems interesting to me
Speaker 1: and that it might be unique. And I wonder if
Speaker 1: you can think of any other examples in that it
Speaker 1: seems like a truly three way symbiotic relationship between the
Speaker 1: plants that are pollinated, the bees that produced the honey,
Speaker 1: and then the human beekeepers. And I was trying to
Speaker 1: think of another relationship that's equally symbiotic three ways, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't quite but I wondered if you had any
Speaker 1: insight on that. Uh. Well, with regard to the bees, uh,
Speaker 1: I think humans are probably interacting with honey bees long
Speaker 1: before we became Homo sapiens. We know now that, for example,
Speaker 1: chimpanzees will will take sticks and fashion them in different thicknesses,
Speaker 1: for example, to tear into a a wild honey bee
Speaker 1: nest and I'll even carry these these sticks around with
Speaker 1: them so they uh, you know, if if the chimpanzees
Speaker 1: are doing that, it's quite likely that the hominans, our
Speaker 1: ancestors are probably doing this as well, uh, going back
Speaker 1: several million years. So this association with bees is very
Speaker 1: ancient in uh, in our species and probably in definitely
Speaker 1: predates some modern modern humans. So in that case that
Speaker 1: since honey bees, they're not truly be keeping their robbing,
Speaker 1: but there is the relationship that they're actually gonna be
Speaker 1: taking advantage of of the the golden sweet windfall of
Speaker 1: of a bee's nest um, and that was probably how
Speaker 1: our our bee keeping originated. There are symbiotic relationhips that
Speaker 1: that that might involve with the three organisms, but don't
Speaker 1: necessarily involve humans. I'm trying to think. So I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of things like the fig wasps of the and things
Speaker 1: like that that you you'd see a very specialized relationship
Speaker 1: between the figs humans and and uh the wasps. And
Speaker 1: in those cases, now, in the case of Egypt today,
Speaker 1: they didn't have the fig wasps, so they were actually
Speaker 1: scarifying the fruit to make it ripen. But and and
Speaker 1: of course that would be a three way example as well. Excellent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about the fig wats. But that's
Speaker 1: that's a that's a tremendous example. That is a great question.
Speaker 1: I like, that's that's that that's coming from the side
Speaker 1: that time we thought about for my mind is really
Speaker 1: clicking on that one. Well, well, that leads into the
Speaker 1: next question I wanted to ask, which is about the
Speaker 1: evolutionary relationship we see with other domesticated animals that that
Speaker 1: humans use for their agricultural agriculture for companionships. So we've
Speaker 1: got dogs, we've got cattle, we've got all kinds of
Speaker 1: you know, draft animals, farm animals that in many ways
Speaker 1: have very much diverged evolutionarily from their wild ancestors. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if we see anything like that with domesticated bees,
Speaker 1: or if we ever will in the future. Um, is
Speaker 1: it because we've had a domestication relationship with bees for
Speaker 1: less time If we don't see that, I think there's
Speaker 1: no question that we've had an impact on on honeybee evolution.
Speaker 1: Case and point in your during the last fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: years when we kept bees uh in straw and wicker
Speaker 1: skep hives, the basket hives. It was very common uh
Speaker 1: in the early earlier centuries when you harvested the honey,
Speaker 1: the beekeeper and walk around, pick up the lift the
Speaker 1: skep and it was really heavy. That would be the
Speaker 1: one that they would harvest. And the how they would harvest.
Speaker 1: They would dig a pit in the ground filled with
Speaker 1: sulfur and brimstone, what have you, and start a fire
Speaker 1: and literally knock all the bees into the fire. Now
Speaker 1: they're what they're doing is taking their best producing bees
Speaker 1: and killing them. M Um Darwin has something to say
Speaker 1: about that. And and what we're seeing is this, we
Speaker 1: have four centuries slowly been killing large numbers of of
Speaker 1: a very good producing colonies. And then we tried to
Speaker 1: some of the Eventually we got the point where they
Speaker 1: could drive the bees out of these wicker basket hives.
Speaker 1: They would they would take the skep hive, put it
Speaker 1: in the full skep, put it upside down in a
Speaker 1: in a pail, and then have an empty skep next
Speaker 1: to it, and using pieces of board nail sort of
Speaker 1: hold that empty scap in place. And they banged the
Speaker 1: daylights out of the side of that pail, and the
Speaker 1: bees would walk out of the full step up into
Speaker 1: the empty, empty skep and the second they could drive
Speaker 1: the bees from one hive to the next. That stopped that.
Speaker 1: We started seeing that in good numbers in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds and quite common during the UH the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: But we for many many years had been you know,
Speaker 1: going out and and selectively killing good producing bees. And
Speaker 1: UH a colleague of mine, UH Steve Shepherd up at
Speaker 1: the Washington State University. He has been looking at the
Speaker 1: diversity of honey bees and it's found that all the
Speaker 1: bees in the United States are all of our queens
Speaker 1: are related to a small number of of queens. It's
Speaker 1: fewer than a thousand. So we've we have dramatically produced
Speaker 1: the genetic diversity of bees over over the years as beekeepers.
Speaker 1: That may be contributing to some of the problems that
Speaker 1: we we are having. And there's a concerted effort now
Speaker 1: Steve is doing this and others to go out all
Speaker 1: over the world and try to h improve the genetic
Speaker 1: diversity by getting UM collecting drones and getting semen UH
Speaker 1: samples to bring back for for crosses. Well, that's really fascinating.
Speaker 1: So that makes me wonder do we already have or
Speaker 1: do you ever think we will have uh, domesticated bees
Speaker 1: that are as different from the wild original hobee as
Speaker 1: say a chihuahua is from the gray wolf. Well, we
Speaker 1: have several, we have several strains are are varieties. Now
Speaker 1: there's the and they're all APIs malifer about their their subspecies.
Speaker 1: They all from what we can tell is they all
Speaker 1: involved on their own and you know, for example, the
Speaker 1: Italian strain came from the the Alperia North and Italian
Speaker 1: what have you? Uh, we are there are has been attempts.
Speaker 1: Brother Adam was a beekeeper who was trying to uh
Speaker 1: selectively breed bees that would mature a little faster to
Speaker 1: help produce it's it's parasite load, for example. So there
Speaker 1: are efforts to do things like that. Uh, I've not
Speaker 1: seen any real overall success that would say that it's
Speaker 1: that's uh that it's come to fruition yet, but that
Speaker 1: it is quite conceivable that we could modify bees through
Speaker 1: selective breeding to be something different. M interesting. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: did you have something else? No, I believe that that's
Speaker 1: that's a great place to to leave off. I just
Speaker 1: wanna I want to thank thank you again Professor Chritski
Speaker 1: for taking the time to chat with us and encourage
Speaker 1: all of our listeners. If you're if you're whether you're
Speaker 1: interested in history or or insects, um if if it's
Speaker 1: the the ancient Egyptian angle or the the beekeeping angle
Speaker 1: that that brings you in like this is just a
Speaker 1: tremendous and accessible read on both topics. My if if
Speaker 1: I can uh the shameless plug, I will say my
Speaker 1: my previous book with Oxford was The Quest for the
Speaker 1: Perfect Hive, which is the history of the modern beehive.
Speaker 1: Excellent and how we how we got from these two
Speaker 1: highs from the Egyptians up to the through basket hives
Speaker 1: into the those white boxes that we see uh out
Speaker 1: in fields. Now, can you tell us what will the
Speaker 1: hives of the future look like? Oh? Well, that's one
Speaker 1: of the themes behind my the book The Quest of
Speaker 1: the Perfect Hive. Is one of the things that's happened
Speaker 1: is we've stopped, we've stopped inventing. It's beginning to come
Speaker 1: back a little bit. But um, when the U during
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, beekeepers were
Speaker 1: spending a lot of money, but to buy equipment that
Speaker 1: was interchangeable, and they were buying extractors and uh uh
Speaker 1: it was rather it's rather expensive to actually retool an
Speaker 1: entire b operation, honeybee operation. And so uh the if
Speaker 1: you went and found a beekeeping supply catalog from the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, it would look just like our catalogs today
Speaker 1: in some case, except they wouldn't have a styro from hives.
Speaker 1: So here we have these we have pre depression Arab
Speaker 1: bees uh uh living in hives that were invented back
Speaker 1: the night twenties, and we we've got we have their
Speaker 1: honey bee geno. And so you know, my question always
Speaker 1: this have we found the perfect hive? And since the
Speaker 1: books come out, we're now seeing a lot of people
Speaker 1: invest uh exploring new hives. Uh. There's a couple that
Speaker 1: are really quite intriguing. The Omelet Hive out of England,
Speaker 1: which is a wonderful hive for it's it's expensive, but
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful hive for the backyard beekeeper. We of
Speaker 1: course they might have recently heard about the flow hive
Speaker 1: that's this hive that uh you economically extract the honey
Speaker 1: from the hive through hoses, and that's that's something that's
Speaker 1: that I believe there's a kick Starter campaign to help
Speaker 1: fund UH fund that. Uh. There there's a lot of
Speaker 1: interest in trying to improve UH bee keeping operations to
Speaker 1: encourage more people to keep bees even if they don't
Speaker 1: want to collect the honey, but just keep the pollinators around.
Speaker 1: Man the bee hive with the hoses. That sounds like
Speaker 1: an hr Geeger kind of contract. You should you should
Speaker 1: take a look at it on They are actually able
Speaker 1: to split the honey comb and then they they the
Speaker 1: honey then flows out through through UH hoses in two
Speaker 1: containers so they don't have to take the high the
Speaker 1: frames out for extracting. Wow. Well that's fascinating. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: I guess we should wrap it up unless there's anything
Speaker 1: else you feel like you would like to say. But
Speaker 1: but I really appreciate you talking to us. I thoroughly
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. All right, So
Speaker 1: there you have it. That book again is The Tears
Speaker 1: of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Gene Kritzky,
Speaker 1: and that is ray spelled r E. You can find
Speaker 1: that it's available in both physical and digital copies right now,
Speaker 1: and will include a link to it on the landing
Speaker 1: page for this uh WET for this episode at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us about this episode or
Speaker 1: any recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
Speaker 1: can always email us at blow the Mind at how
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Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com Like