Honey and wax have been prized for thousands of years, At first honey and was were gathered from the hives of wild bees in hollow trees, but more than three thousand years ago a closer partnership evolved between bees and humans as the art of beekeeping was discovered.

The first hives were hollow logs, sometimes suspended in trees. The same technique can still be observed today in Africa. But rotting logs can encourage disease, not to mention an inaudinate number of stings during the extraction process.

Wattle and daub hives woven from supple willow plastered over with clay, or with a mixture of mud and cow dung, proved much easier to handle in the medieval period and onward. The boxes used today with their excluders to separate the brood and supers to handle heavy harvests, have greatly increased the efficiency of beekeeping.

Honey was more than a sweetening agent in ancient times. It was also a preserving agent for fruits and other foods, and was used in cosmetics and medicinally. It still is today. One use well worthy of remembering was employed extensively in more than one theatre of World War I when honey was used as a dressing for wounds, sores, and as a post-surgical treatment in an era before antibiotics. Field doctors working in Africa and other areas where infection rates were high believed they saved many cases of gangrene with the simple use of honey smothered over wounds. Honey inhibits the multiplication of bacteria, but this is no modern discovery. Roman legionaires who had good reason to need effective wound healants carriedd honey in their packs. Thyme honey was considered particularly effective. Today a number of hospitals are rediscovering this age old method of excluding bacterial infections after surgery, burns, and skin infections, particularly in Europe. The dead were also embalmed in honey in the ancient world, particularly if a body was being transported long distances. For instance, Alexander the Great’s body was returned to Greece in a coffin filled with honey.

The mystical bee
The triumverate of honey, wax, and bees have had sacred and mythical significance since the earliest times, from the Far East to Western Europe. Vishnu, for instance, is represented by a blue bee on a lotus flower, while Krishna is represented by a bee worn on his forehead.

Honey had as much to do with weddings and honeymoons in India as it did in Western Europe. In a traditional Hindu marriage, honey and curds are offered to the bridegroom when he first crosses the threshold of the bride’s home. In the traditional marriage ceremony, the groom recites the following after kissing the bride: ‘Honey, this is honey, in my mouth lives the honey of the bee, in my teeth lives peace.”

Palestine, devastated by modern wars and privations, was the Biblical land flowing with milk and honey. Both the Old Testament of the Bible and the Talmud contain many references to honey and beekeeping. According to an Arab writer, the prophet Mohammed said:’Honey is a remedy for every illness, and the Koran is a remedy for all illnesses of the mind, therefore I recommend you to both remedies, the Koran and honey.”

The Hittites, whose greatest influence in Asia Minor was from c. 2,800 BC to 700 BC were also advanced in the art of beekeeping and the Greeks continued to add to the knowledge they bequeathed on the art of bee keeping. There were honey and wax merchants in Greece by 500 BC.

The most famous honey in the ancient world came from thyme covered Mount Hymettus in Attica, now perilously close to modern Athens, and Greece continues to produce many other ancient traditional honey varieties. Western Crete produces its own thyme honey, harvested from the mountains in the summer. From the Aegean Islands comes a wildflower and thyme honey with a three thousand year history. Greek Macedonia has been famed since ancient times for its delicate wildflower honey, and for fir tree honey from the mountains. The wild chestnut honey from Mount Pilo has been valued for thousands of years for its positive effects on digestion and its ability to quicken the mind. Heather honey was considered valuable for inflammation of the urinary tract as well as the perect marinade roasted wild pig. The fragrant blossom of the famed orange orchards of Epinurus yielded a delicate pale honey said to calm the mind and, be the perfect accompaniment for the famed creamy thick Greek yoghurt. Italy and France have their own ancient traditional honey varieties including lavender. ‘Telling the bees’
In many countries including Greece, Scotland, and Germany the soul was supposed to leave the body as a bee, and perhaps this is the origin of the ancient custom of ‘telling the bees’. Momentous events, including deaths in the family, were told to the bees. One form of ‘telling the bees’ in the event of the head of the house dying consisted of the widow or famil knocking on the beehive three times and reciting the following: ‘Bees, bees, thy master is dead,
Fly not away but remain to comfort me.”

Weddings were festive occasions to dress the hives with flowers and bright ornaments in parts of Germany and Austria. Beeswax Candles
A very close association between the Christian Church and the bee existed from the medieval period. Ecclesiatical regulations specified that candles were to be made of 100% beeswax, recognising their clean burning, sweet scented, low polluting qualities.. Church usage was enormous. The Pascal candle burned at Easter, for instance, weighed a massive 200 lbs (around 91 kg in modern metric measure). High Mass might be celebrated by the use of fifty candles or more. Following even older beliefs than Christianity, a medieval Welsh manuscript, for instance, instructed that”the origin of bees is from Paradise....therefore the Mass cannot be said without wax.”

Monasteries were long involved in beekeeping, and beehives held a strong medieval symbolism, especially for the Benedictine Order, and were associated with the industrious and selfless habits of bees. The beehive became the symbol for a monastic community. Buckfast Abbey in England maintains this ancient tradition today with its famous strain of Buckfast bees, gentle, productive, and tough, the result of the patient labour and vision of Brother Adam.

The bee garden
Modern beekeeping is associated with following seasonal nectar flows, moving hives from one site to another. But for earlier beekeepers, hives were maintained within gardens and orchards that were filled with such a great variety of nectar and pollen producing plants, well protected by walling or hedges from strong cold winds, that bees could gather all their needs from spring to autumn, a continuous feast. Part of the art of the beekeeper was to maintain a garden filled with the sweet clean fragrances that bees love, and with abundant varied plants for the hive’s needs. The reward for the orchard and vegetable garden lay in the high pollination rates associated with the bees, and such old gardens yielded prolifically due to the bees’ ministrations.

Many herbs are very attractive to bees, particularly borage, thyme, and lavender. The fat, blue banded, and non-stinging native bees of Australia are as enraptured by lavender in flower as any of their European cousins.

The intensely blue, starlike flowers of borage fill with foraging bees fighting for a landing space. Borage was once believed to confer courage. Pliny, a chronicler of the first century, wrote “I. Borage, bring always courage.” Medieval Ladies often embroidered a scarf for their favoured knight with a flower of borage together with an attendant bee. John Evelyn wrote of similar beliefs in the seventeenth century: “Sprigs of Borage are of known virtue to revive the hypochondriac and cheer the hard student.”

Thyme comes principally from the countries that border the Mediterranean. Some are small shrublets, such as the wild thyme of Provence, Westmoreland Thyme, Lemon Thyme, Oregano Thyme, Orange Thyme, and Conehead Thyme. Others have a ground hugging habit, forming a dense spreading mat that knits itself to the earth with adventitious roots formed at each node. The latter are called matting or spreading thymes, and like the little shrubby thymes contain an amazing range of fragrances including Caraway Thyme, ‘Annie Hall’. ‘Magic Carpet’, ‘Lemon Spreader, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Alba’, and ‘Lemon Frost’. Bees love them all, as much as those do who garden with herbs, and many of the matting thymes smother in tiny honey filled blossoms. Kipling wrote evocatively of “wind-bit thyme that smells of dawn in Paradise”. Strangely, thyme was the alternative medieval symbol for courage, and like the blue borage flower was often embroidered on a scarf, together with the ubiquitous bee, for a Knight Errant by his lady as a symbol of courage. The very word thyme comes from the Greek word thymus meaning ‘courage’.

So many close relatives of thyme and lavender, all in the plant family Lamiaceae (previously Labiatae) are attractors of bees. Resinous scented rosemary, heather-bell flowered savory, lavender flowered catmint, sweet and spicy marjoram and oregano, sweet mints and lemon balm, pennyroyal, lemon and camphor scented Cedonella, catnip, clove fragrant basil, hyssop, anise hyssop, and horehound are all the haunt of summer bees. Garden sage in all its varieties is very attractive indeed to bees, and the variety ‘Provence Lilac’ released by Honeysuckle Cottage is particularly lovely.

Blue is a colour very attractive to bees, and blue flowers should be part of the mixture of plants grown in a bee attracting garden. Rich blue cornflowers, Tweedia (Oxypetalum), blue flowered alkanet, blue flowered forget-me-nots (both Myosotis and Anchusa varieties), the many sea hollies (Eryngium species), and Pride of Madeira Echium fastuosum with tall dense spires of blue flowers which are a magnet for bees, butterflies, and honeyeaters, are all suitable.

Sainfoin is one of the Nine Sacred Herbs and is very attractive to bees. Other suitable herbs include motherwort, coltsfoot, Goat’s Rue, soapwort, honeywort Cerinthe major and sweet woodruff. Add to these lemon and orange trees, almonds, peaches, cherries, nectarines, flowering currant, the old-fashioned pot pourri roses such as Damasks, Gallicas, Albas, Centifolias, and Mosses, hawthorn Crataegus, and golden-flowered Broom. The Lime or Linden Tree Tilia with its sweet spring fragrance is immensely popular with bees.

Add such old-fashioned plants as clove pinks, vanilla scented cherry pie Heliotropium, pincushion flowers and Sweet Sultan Scabious, sweet violets Viola odorata, and blue flowered salvias such as Anise Scented Sage S. guaranitica, Guatemalen Blue Sage S. cacaliifolia, Gentian or Prairie Sage S. azurea var. grandiflora, Mexican Sage S. mexicana, Bog Sage S. uliginosa (quite tolerant of dry conditions!), and powder blue S. polystachys. Also blue flowered Love-In-The-Mist and her sister Black Cumin Nigella, heathers, poppies, red clover, perennial primroses and cowslips, poppies, evening primroses, and buddleias...............

What a garden this would be, alive with fresh clean scents and soft clear colours, drenched with nectar and powdered with pollen, and above all alive with the thrumming of a thousand bees upon their endless summer business.

To keep bees happily with their hives, use a secret of the bee masters of old when you “desire tthe Bees to keep together and causeth others to come unto them’” and pick a bunch of clean fragranced lemon balm to rub the sides and entrance of the hive.