From the Vault: Tears of Re

this episode was a lot of fun. Jean was great to talk to, and I remember it fondly, as I often do BE related topics, but especially be related topics that can get into ancient mythology. Yeah, you have ancient Egypt and honey bees. Uh, what's not to love? Author in my eyes? All right, let's dive in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetup works dot com. The god Ray wept, and the tears from his eyes

fell on the ground and turned into a bee. The bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers of every plant, and so wax was made and also honey out of the Tears of Ray. H Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a beautiful little reading. Robert, what was that? That quote comes to us from a nine translation of a three hundred b CE bit of writing. It's it's essentially cursive hieroglyphs, which

is called the hieratic writing. And more specifically, this wonderful uh little expert comes from a book titled The Tears of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Jean Kritzky. And at the end of this episode we're going to chat with the author just a little bit about some of the material we're discussing here and about the book The Tears of Ray. This was a very interesting book.

Robert and I both read it for this episode, and it essentially it covers the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the honeybee, the complex economic, religious, and scientific relationship, you might say, going back and forth between them. But we should start, I guess with Ray, because that's the focus of the poems segment you read at the beginning.

Who is Ray? Ray? You may be more familiar with the name Raw are a uh, the sun god, the creator god of the ancient Egyptians, as often depicted as sort of like a bird's head, the head of a falcon, but also a sun disc that travels across the sky and then of as dusk it gets eaten and then goes into the underworld. Well, actually I think those are two different myths. Right, it goes into the underworld and then comes back out. But there's another version where Ray

gets eaten and then gets re birthed. Yeah, and there's a there's a lot of material about the like he travels across the sky and a solar barge, and then there's a different barge that travels through the underworld at night, and and sometimes the additional gods on those barges. It's uh, it's it's very complex. One of the things I definitely did find out from this book is that these days, if you want to be in line with the academic

Egyptology community, you say Ray, not Raw. Now. I I got Raw from the movie Stargate, where Raw is the bad guy who is essentially an alien version of an Egyptian god. But but that that's not anymore, it's right. Yeah, Plus most most Egyptologists dismiss uh Stargate as a reputable

source of real days. Yeah. I don't know why, but but yeah, this this episode, I hopefully what we're gonna do here is is we will will allow you to leave the podcast with maybe a little more understanding and respect for the kingdom of the bees and a little more respect and understanding for the kingdom of ancient Egypt, because there's a there's so much complexity in both and uh, and it's fascinating to sort of look here at this this kingdom within a kingdom and how they how they

were related to each other. Oh, the b kingdom within the Egyptian yea, because because yeah, we have a monarch, uh, monarchy within the honey bee hive, and then workers we have a lot of workers toiling away involved in this industry. And then uh, we have this we have ancient Egypt. We have another monarchy with a very complex system of order. Uh, A lot of industry going on, a lot of workers toiling to make it all possible. And also sort of

a two ways cyber by addic symbiotic relationship. Yeah. Indeed, but I guess we should start with the bee first, because obviously the b pre dates ancient Egypt as a civilization, probably not the land mass. So Robert, where do bees come from? Well, I'm glad you asked, Joe. Let me tell you about the bees. Uh, you'd have to travel back about a hundred million maybe a hundred thirty million years, depending on who you're talking to, all the way back

to the Cretaceous period. Okay, you'd find dinosaurs roam to the earth. Yeah. Yeah, we're going away back here, and you find a world rather different than the one we're we encountered today. Uh, devoid of flowering plants and occupied mostly by conifers, which depend on the wind to spread their seats. Can you imagine that? I mean a world where where reproduction depends entirely on the whims of the weather.

Like can you imagine if animals Because trees can't walk around and find each other to mate, they're stuck in place ease and bushes, you know, whatever you want. Plants are not very mobile, so they essentially have to spray their reproductive material into the air, just hoping it gets somewhere worthwhile by chance. Yeah. Indeed, this is just an earlier state, and there's just the the the evolution of seed transfer. So there are no flowers and there's certainly

no pollination. Now there were There were no bees at this point, but there were wasps. And these wasps were also kind of different from the wasps that we encounter today. They were hymenoptera, the order that wasts and bees are in. Yeah, indeed they were, now they were, but they were carnivorous. They preyed on spiders and other insects and many of which in turn fed on vegetation. Uh so a lot. So, so we have a traffic going on here all right. Seeds are going into the air, the wasps are eating

the insects that live on the plants. But plant of evolution eventually begins to make the most out of this constant insect traffic, using it like the wind and to carry a genetic material from plant to plant, and this results in the rise of angiosperms. These are plants that depend on insects to spread genetic material and pollen from male plant parts called anthers to female parts called stigmas. This is one of those moments I often want to say, like, oh,

how smart that is. It's like as if somebody planned it. Now, of course it wasn't These are just the the wonderful ingenuities of evolution acting upon the environment. But uh, it's fascinating how things like this come about. So you have to imagine a system where these plants are pollinating by wind, but they have this this sperm the pollination material I guess you would say pollen. Uh, And somehow insects start

getting this stuff on their bodies. Right, Essentially, a new wind emerges and that wind is the movement of these insects. And then, of course, once that works out for long enough, plants sort of evolve traits to specialize in that mode of transmission. It's no longer accident, it's how they work now. In indeed, you see the the emergence of the delicious nectar to sweeten the deal for the pollen carrying insects, saying hey, come here, get all nice and covered in polony.

And I'm totally anthropomorphizing the entire process here, My apologies, but but yeah, essentially bribing the insects with the with the the delicious nectar to get them to carry the pollen, giving them a specific reason to traffic the parts of the plant where pollen is produced. So I can imagine if you're some wasp d thirty five thirty million years ago and you've been hunting insects. That's that's tough work,

you know, it's it's really tough. Now, if you could just start getting all of your meals from a passive plant that will sit there and let you just lap up delicious sweet things from its open maw, that I mean, what a nice deal. Yeah, Yes, suddenly there's this, there's

this wonderful new way to get the food you need now. Granted, there's still there's still sort of tie to their predatory past, and indeed today, um you'll you have you can look at most common wasps and they're depending upon upon nectar as their primary food, but they still have to turn to their carnivorous ways when it comes to rearing their young, implanting their young in the belly off another creature wasps.

Oh yeah, yeah, which is just a wonderful area that we have explored in past podcast and I'm sure will return in the future. Christian and I talked about it in our X Files episode. Yes of course, yeah, that parasitoid wasps are Not only is it just an endlessly fascinating area, but we just get new studies each year with either a new type of parasitoid wasp or some

new details about a species we are already familiar with. Yeah, so the wasps evolved to to live off of what is provided by the plants, and in an interesting way, I think we could think about this as the plants domesticating livestock. Yeah, the plants have domesticated the live stock of in insects in order to do their bidding. And of course the wasps are one thing, but it's the bees where we really see this takeoff, because of course bees evolve from wasps, they're all related. But the bees

are actually they're getting the nectar. They're bringing it back for their young. They're they're they're they're they're creating honey, they're creating these uh, these these waxy nests. They are completely beholden to the nectar. Uh. They're no longer going out and and specifically killing other creatures to rear their young. Okay, so when we're talking about honey bees, true honey bees, that this is the genus APIs right, Yes, and that's why we also refer to it as uh is apriculture.

Oh yeah, bee keeping not the keeping of apes. A fun fact to remember, by the way, next time you're adding a dab of honey to your earl gray tea, Is that honey is bee barf? Right? Yes? Is how honey is produced. It's produced by uh bees grabbing some sweet nectar, which is pretty much sugar water from plants

and then going through a complex process of regurgitation and evaporation. Yeah, so they're kind of uh, you know, distilling it, refining it through their They're just regigitation of the material, you know, And I should I should also mentioned that, uh, when it comes to two bees, we have bumble bees, we have stingless bees, and we even have a few other

non bee species that produce honey and small amounts. But for the most part, we're you know, we're dealing with those uh, those APIs honey bees, which are the superstars, the generators of like a true bounty and excess of honey, uh in the amount that it makes sense for humans to raise them and pillage their stores. Now, when I was a kid, I used to wonder how we eat honey. But I know bees make honey. I did not know

that they barfed honey up for us. I didn't know that they made honey, but I didn't know what they did with it. I was like, why do they make it? Is it just? What is it? What's it for? Did the bees themselves eat the honey? Yeah, they stored as a primary food source. They also eat what is called bee bread, which is a semiary cute name. Yeah. Yeah, it's essentially like a pollen cake, you know. But yeah, the the honey is a food source for the bee people,

if you will. Um, And they stored away and those waxy cells in the honeycomb. But you mentioned wax. Of course, wax is another important byproduct of bee culture. It's it's their second great technology, yes, indeed, and uh and the wax that the workers actually secrete from specialized glands on the underside of their abdomen's wait what they secrete it? Yeah? Essentially, you know, you can think of them as like wax nipples.

I guess, um, the bee the bees have wax nipples and they put out the wax and what it's a little flaky lipids for us. Yeah, And they get the raw materials for this metabolized product through the consumption of that honey and that be bread, which we already mentioned and the be bread. Uh I should also have have

pointed out that it's essentially a collected fermented pollen. So um, so these service the so it kind of goes around in a circle, right, the nectar, the honey, the wax, this whole um, this whole little little city for the insects, built from the bounty of the flowers. Yeah. Now, long before humans started formalized apriculture, before they started making bee hives to keep bees in to sort of have an agriculture of insects, they hunted honey. Right, there was wild

honey hunting. The same way you would hunt game in the forest or on the savannah, you could hunt honey just as it occurred in a bee hive that might be hanging from a tree. And there are actually ancient works of cave art that depict this. Yeah, there's still also honey hunting traditions that survived to this day. And it's essentially the same thing a bear does. Right of a bear breaks into a honey hive or a honey badger,

it goes after some some bees as well. You just you find out where the hive is, you locate it, and then you you who is the best skills at your disposal to break in there and get as much dripping honeycomb as possible and run off with it. Now, Krisky's book has an illustration, or not an illustration. It does have an illustration, but also a photo of this great cave painting from Spain that seems to depict honey

hunting from How how old is this thing? Yeah, this dates back seven thousand to eight thousand years, so that gives us a rough estimate not not not where it began, but at least how far it probably goes. Yeah, and so what what's depicted in the painting is this great setup.

It looks like a scene from a movie where you've got somebody hanging from a rope apparently off a cliff, being lowered down to an area where there's a tree with a bee's nest hanging off of it, and reaching in to grab the honey and you can see bees swarming around the person. I mean, that's a lot of trust in whoever's holding the rope, right, yeah, and uh and and and you know you're just getting just the

b Jesus stung out of you the whole time. But it's just such I mean especially in a energy density, energy counsity of that of that that score. I mean, this stuff is just it's pure gold, uh, nutritionally speaking, so you're going to occasionally do what it takes to get it and bring it back, not to mention the value you're going to have bringing that stuff back to your community. But I guess we should now look at

when when true apriculture started. When did we start having bee hives where where we sort of set up an enclosure and said bees go live in there, here's where you should make your homes, and they obeyed. Alright, So it's best we can tell. Bee keeping probably emerged by accident,

probably in the fertile crescent um. And probably what you had happened was you have human industries is creating all of these different pots and containers, uh for your various agricultural efforts, and one might leave a pot hanging around

somewhere unused. Suddenly some bees come in, they take up a resident in the pot, and this could theoretically serve as as like the first accidental bee hive that's actually kept by the beekeepers and they realize, oh bees will will will actually build their nest in this uh, the spot. If I leave it out for them, there's a chance I'll have my own captive honey. I've yeah. I mean

talk about turning a loss into a wind. So imagine you know you've got this jar that you were planning on keeping full of urgad infested rye uh, and you go back to get it and suddenly it's full of bees and you're like, oh man, my plans are spoiled. I'm gonna get stung cleaning this thing out. But then you realize you have access to all this sweet sweet honey. Yeah. And and not only the honey, but the wax. The wax is key because uh, there is evidence of lost

wax castings uh dating back to thirty BC. Now a lost wax casting for anyone not familiar, this has to do with, uh with a cast used to make uh like a metal objects in which it's you build like the clay or what have you, around a wax model of the thing you're going to build, and then you melt the wax out of there. And while you have this mold which you can use to make metal tacks. It's a way of turning easily multiple wax into metal,

which is pretty awesome. Yeah. So the only thing here is that you don't have to be a beekeeper to get that wax. That wax could have been obtained through honey hunting. We just don't know. Um. But when when it comes to actually finding the the earliest evidence of bee raising, of bee keeping, then you really have to go to the Egyptians, to the ancient Egyptians. Uh. And this would put us around three thousand BC. That's five

thousand years ago. Yeah. I mean it's amazing just to consider, completely separate from the topic of beekeeping, how enormously long ancient Egypt went on. Yeah, we're talking roughly. You have five thousand years of of human history wound up in the ancient Egyptians. U A a civilization that after you know, even when it was going it was it was an

ancient civilization. Um. And of course it's gonna it's impossible for us to summarize, you know, thousands of years of ancient history, the ebb and flow of political and social change here. Uh. You know, in the In the same way that Egyptian history is tied closely to the Nile, so too is the region's history a long, twisting, swelling,

shrinking movement. Across the landscape of human history. But to summarize, we're talking the civilization of ancient North Africa, generally attributed to lasting from roughly thirty one hundred BC to three and twenty two uh see. So that's talking about the transition out of the Stone Age, out of the Nearithic period, the beginning of large scale civilization in ancient Egypt until the time I think they mark the end of it with the time that the last hieroglyphic carvings were made

in Egypt. Yes, and it's the one in three hundred some things. He correct. Now. You can also some historians um And and authors including Jane Chrisky also go ahead and include that Neolithic period and that would put the beginning around fifty undred BC. So that's where you would get a total time period of around uh five thousand, one hundred and sixty three years of culture. Yeah. So for those of you who think it's been forever since the American Revolution or something like that, it is such

a tiny blip. Modern history is such a tiny blip humans who really dwarfs the modern age. So you know, that's essentially the time period we're talking about, and during that time the ancient Egyptians demonstrated their expertise of a number of general and highly specialized categories and skills. They were accomplished farmers and engineers. They were artists and linguists. They were soldiers, they were astrologers, they were doctors, and much more. I mean, everyone knows about the Pyramids and

areous architectural marvel marvels that survived this day. Everyone knows about the rich history of mummification, which we've talked about here on the show before, but there other stuff just continues continually fascinates me when I read about it. For instance, to find out that ancient Egyptians perform surgical skin graphs as early as eight hundred BC UM and uh, indeed, as we're discussing in this episode, that they practice uh

the earliest known examples of apriculture. Okay, well, once Egyptian civilization is underway, once we've got our our dynasties and our organized hierarchical civilization and culture, we we should look at the role bees and honey played in that. And one of the first things I think we can observe is that there is a glyph in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language. It's one of their symbols, that's a honey bee. That's right, Yeah, it's um. It shows up in some

of the earliest examples of ancient Egyptian writing. UM. In fact, we we see it in use by the Old Kingdom

that's h D seven through. And we probably shouldn't try to get too much into talking about the different ages froch in Egypt, but essentially there's an Old Kingdom that goes on for a long time with many Pharaonic dynasties, and then there's an intermediate period that's sort of like a Dark Age, and then there is a Middle Kingdom, and then there's another break in that there's another intermediate period, and then there's a new Kingdom, and then of course

there's the Greco Roman period. But but essentially coming into

the Middle Age. Yeah, but but essentially at this point, just think of this that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx are there, they're relatively newly constructed, and there's evidence already that the Egyptians had at that point uh mastered to some degree beekeeping and we're producing honey Okay, Yeah, according to um to Kritsky, here there's evidence from around this point that you actually had a a row in the in the governmental structure known as the seiler of honey.

There's an individual who was the seiler of honey, and this at least suggests either very organized honey hunting or quite possibly the beginnings of industrialized um beekeeping. You know, I love this title that you see throughout ancient Egypt. The seiler. Yeah, the person who seals and that that

abuse an authority. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of our our recent episode on the INCA, and we talked about the importance within a government, with importance within an empire, of of having a way to of course record uh, you know, amounts when it comes to goods, the the price of goods, the exchange of goods, and then also being able to to seal it and say this is what is contained within and uh and someone is accountable for it. Yeah. It's a very wonderful physical metaphor for

having the final word on something. But so we do see in ancient in Egypt the evidence of the first organized beekeeping, right. Yeah. The The current earliest known evidence takes this uh to uh around UH hundred and thirteen d c E and specifically, it takes us to the solar temple chasap be Brick. So what we have here within the ruins of this solar temple, that's again it's it's devoted to to ray. We see decorative color reliefs

that show off scenes of desert wildlife, boating and beep keeping. Yeah, and it's got these different vignettes that actually showed the stage. I mean, it's not just sort of like a cartoon like, oh, here are some people beekeeping it. It's sort of, uh, comprehensive. It shows the different steps you take in order to do the main jobs of a beekeeper. Yeah, and uh, there's a certain amount of interpretation that has to take place in figuring out exactly what they're showing and exactly

what those of vignettes are showing. They especially because some part of it are missing. Yeah, some parts are missing androw damage and uh and depending on what's going on there, you know that that ends up impacting our understanding of exactly how advanced they were. So for instance, that there's one of the vignettes in particular represents a man either using a smoker to control the bees or he's calling

a queen to enter a jug. Now, either one of those options is very interesting, and we should talk about what that actually means. To to smoke the bees or to call the queen. Yeah, the smoking thing. I think most people are familiar with this because if you've seen any footage or just or even just in the course of your life, if you've seen beekeeping, you've probably seen people using a smoker because the smoke, uh, calms the bees.

That's a nice way. It's a nice way of putting it. Yeah, it's uh, it's it's a weapon you get to use against the bees so you can pill with their goods. It's like saying tear gas calms the crowd. Yeah, yeah, but it works. And when you try and figure out exactly how this came about, you know, who knows. Somebody was getting stung by bees and they leveled their torch at them and they noticed the smoke helped. Or perhaps one was making a burnt offering, and they found that

the incense, Uh, the smoke from the incense calmed the bees. Uh. You know, there are a couple of different ends there. Now. The calling is also a fascinating possibility. Whichever one he's doing here. If he's calling it seems to be that he's got to bee hive up to his face and he's making sounds with his mouth into the beehive to get the bees to do something, which which is just amazing. Now,

how exactly would this work? What would he be doing? Well, it's known as is piping, and uh, it's it's a very real thing, and it's also still practiced in some beekeeping traditions, especially in Egypt to this day. Like even despite all that has fallen away from ancient Egypt and modern Egyptian culture, you still see some of these traditional beekeeping practices that are utilized there. So essentially what's happening here is a bee keeper mimics the queen's audible communication.

So the queen is pushing her thorax against the honeycomb and vibrating her wing muscles without moving her wings. Uh, and it creates this um. It's a it's a a a long tone followed by a series of short burst and I've heard it described as zeep, zeep, zeep. There's also a cack cack, yeah right, yeah, yeah, So they're there are different tones that the bees make to one

another to communicate, to signal. Essentially, what they need to do in the next stage of a reproductive process, like if a if a young queen is within the nest right and specifically here, my understanding is that what the the bee caller is doing is creating the sound of an emergent virgin queen, and then that would cause the existing monarch or another emergent queen to come forward and fight herr and try to kill her. Uh calling her out? Yeah,

calling her out. So you're you're manipulating the bees speaking their language in order to draw the queen away so that you can put her in a bottle, move her to another hive, and use her presence to manipulate the uh your creation of new hives or just moving the existing hive. Yeah. So just the idea of of a human being able to make bee sounds to talk to the bees is fascinating on its own. Also that they figured this out in ancient Egypt, but there are other

techniques displayed at Newer Sara in these solar temple as well. Right. Yeah, there's another vignette that seems like it shows a man pouring something from a spout. So this might be honey taken from the hive. It might be honey that's just separated from the wax. They might be deluding it. Um, we're deluding the honey honey with water. And I remember reading in Krinsky's book that that that some have commented on this and thought, well, maybe they were making meat

or something. Um, you know, because you can of course take honey and create an alcoholic average from it. But there's apparently no real evidence that that's what was actually taking place here. Though they apparently did add honey, perhaps in deluded form, to their alcohol. Yeah, so they sweetened wine or beer with it, but they didn't make meat as far as we know. As far as we know. Yeah, now, looking at these vignettes, I wanted to observe something that

struck me as quite strange. Throughout this book and so meaning throughout ancient Egypt, there are lots of pictures of bees. I mean, this makes sense because we have this b glyph, this standard be illustration that's part of the hieroglyphic language,

you know, the written language system. But they're also all these illustrations of bees that appear in vignettes and carvings throughout ancient Egypt, depicting a swarm of bees or a bee next to a jar showing that the jar has honey in it, or in these beekeeping scenes, and I noticed very often it looks to me like these bees do not have a correct number of legs. Indeed, yeah, and I feel like I don't want to be pedantic here, but often you see the bees with four legs, or

you see them with three legs. I can understand the three legs, because we know insects have six legs. The three legs maybe you're just seeing one side of the bee, so each leg stands for a pair. But the ones where it shows four legs or maybe five legs, like four forward legs and one back legs sticking out, those are strange to me, especially since there's like no animal

on earth that has an odd number of legs. But anyway, this four legged ancient be sort of it rang a bell vaguely in the back of my mind, and I was like, where do I know that concept from before? And it was it was it was saying to me go back to Sunday school. So I did. I checked it out. I looked in the Bible, and bingo in the Bible, in in the the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus eleven twenty to twenty three, we read about four legged insects in a part of the Ancient Hebrew dietary restrictions.

So I just want to read this selection of Leviticus from the New American Standard translations. Is this is referring to which insects that are are kosher, Yeah, which you can and can't eat? And so the translation reads like this, all the winged insects that walk on all fours are detestable to you. Yet these you may eat. Among the winged insects which walk on all fours, those which have above their feet jointed legs with which to jump on

the earth. These of them you may eat. The locust and its kinds, and the devastating locusts and its kinds, and the cricket in its kinds, and the grasshopper in its kinds. But all other winged insects which are four footed, are detestable to you. Now, obviously I'm not trying to like hammer these ancient people, like what a bunch of dummies. I mean, they weren't dummies. You wouldn't expect either the ancient Egyptian artists who created the solar temple carving, or

any of these other carvings and illustrations. Uh, Nor would you expect the Jewish author who wrote this part of Leviticus to be kind of entomologists studying bees up close and locusts to see how many legs they have. Right, there's a division in Egyptian society, and the individuals who are who are keeping the bees are probably separate from those that are actually carving the hieroglyphics. Yeah. So I'm

certainly not saying that they're stupid. They should have known better, But but it just did seem like an interesting coincidence that multiple ancient people's would get this wrong. And also, as I kept reading in the book, I came across more art that depicted bees this way is on this Old Kingdom seal amulet, on a Middle Kingdom Scarab carving, And so it just made me wonder, is there a widespread belief in the ancient Near East that insects had

four legs? Well, you know, after you brought this to my attention, I was looking around a little about it, and certainly there's there's a lot of just pointless information out there, with people either using this as as an argument against religion and against the Bible saying, Hey, they got the number of legs on a on a on a asshopper. Long, how wrong? How can you trust anything? Yeah?

I read in Food and Culture a Reader by Carol Counahan and Penny than Estric that that possibly the I mean, the biblical distinction here is more about insects that walk versus those that that fly, or at least kind of have that live in that area between true flight and uh and walking. So in that case, it would be saying something like the saying having four legs or going on all fours, which the Bible passage says, in which these b images indicate it's not really about counting the

number of legs. It's more just kind of like this is in the category of things that crawl, right, that it's a land animal and that but bees fly. Bees fly, so they're okay. So it's more like saying, don't eat

that the insect land animals. But then then another thing that comes to mind here is just the law of conservation of detail, which is the reason that everybody in the Simpsons would only have four digits on each hand, and why you do see a number of bees and other insects and cartoons that have the wrong number of limbs, because ultimately, when you're recreating these things that on a smaller, unreal scale, you are forced to to use an inaccurate

number of limbs or digits. Oh well, that seems like a very logical explanation to me, especially for the the illustrations of the bees. Yeah, and certainly worth remembering for future alien civilizations that come to our plan and try and figure out the Simpsons what is what are they trying to tell us? What? What is with the fingers? So um, it's first of all, it's it's interesting to just discuss the importance of of honey as a trade good.

I was really fascinated by this, uh, because it's it's Critsky points out Egyptian societies didn't a society didn't really have a currency. I mean they sort of didn't. They didn't have a physical currency, had like they had an ideal currency which they would use to Essentially, the way it worked is you had a measure of a certain metal, like copper, and then you would have certain quantities of that copper, but you wouldn't actually hold the copper in

your hand. So if you were owed, for example, five debans, of copper. You would be paid five debans of copper worth of grain or something like that. Yeah, and there would be there would also be cases where if you were supposed to pay or be paid in grain and they did not have the grain, you might pay in honey. So honey in a in a sense was the currency. But and it was valuable for what I understand, and that value would go up and down, but it was

it was a valuable commodity. It wasn't something that everybody beating all the time. It was sort of a luxury food item. Yeah, a luxury food item as well as we'll discuss an item that is that is utilized in medicine and magic. So you're saying honey was money, Yeah, honey was money. And since honey was money, honey was of course also an industry, a state run industry. Um that they were the edge of ancient Egyptians where a civil organization, and that's how they that's how they built

their wonders, that's how they made their honey. They had a system of beekeepers, overseers, overseers too to look over those overseers. They're just a whole um you know, system, uh, to regulate the production of honey and then ultimately the trade of honey with other with other cultures. But of course the honey also had a great spiritual significance within Egyptian religion and their their their priesthood and their mythology. Right. Yeah, I mean we we already talked about the tears of ray.

The bee is the tear of ray, and the sun god cries and his his tears become a gift to us that gives us this sweet, sweet food. Yeah, it is uh, it is the the product of a of a holy animal to the ancient Egyptians and certainly too. I mean, it's golden, It glistens when the sunlight hits it. It appears to close. You can you can easily imagine just carrying a little of your your symbolic, magical understanding of the world into your your contemplation of honey. It's

just it's this, this potent, perfect thing. Now. Of course, in the ancient world, we often see an association between healing and religious ritual. That it's very likely in an ancient culture that you might find the medicines and the doctors sort of overlapping with the priesthood and the sacred rights that there wasn't always so much of a distinction between science based medicine and magic based medicine. And you certainly see that come through with honey, because honey actually

does have known medical uses that are truly effective. Uh. It was also used as a you know, a sort of functional medicine, but also as a magical medicine in ancient Egypt. That's right. Yeah, I mean we're in a we're in a city suation where the best minds are using the materials at hand to try and treat injuries

and disease. Some of it is working, some of it is sort of working, some of it's not working, but maybe it seems to work, and some of it just feels right within the uh uh, you know, the framework of their worldview. So it's interesting that Egyptian physicians who were at the time were considered some of the best in the world. Like this was again in ancient Egypt. You found skin drafts taking place. Um. So, an Egyptian physician would treat a wound, but they would also give

you a wax amulet to burn. Uh. And and this is key because because because you take the wax, all right, you make a candle from the wax or just this amulet, and when it burns, it burns up brightly, and it burns up completely. So symbolically and by extension magically, it consumes the illness, burning completely. Mean there's no ash left, no ash at all. I mean, so there's this almost a magical quality to that. You'd expect ash from all of the other burning you do in your normal life.

I mean, we all burn a lot of things, but there's always some evidence left behind. If you can burn this wax figuring up completely, something does seem very otherworldly about that. Yeah, and you burn it. You burn this thing that is made from this substance that comes from the creature that in turn came from the God of the sign. Now, speaking of the sacred or religious aspects, I couldn't pardon me this indulgence, but I could not

help but notice that sort of understanding. The science behind the emergence of beekeeping is to see the biological evolution of a trinity between three organisms. So you've got your auto trophes, your pollinators, and your domesticators. The auto trophes are the plants, you know, These are the creators of the energy in this chain, and they create nectar from sunlight,

so they turned the sunlight photo energy into sugar. Then the pollinators, the bees in a way or sort of the redeemers, they convert this, uh, this scant nectar that the plants produce through a process of sacred barfing, into very highly concentrated and prized, valuable honey. And then of course the domesticators, which are the human beekeepers are I would think of them sort of as like the order the logos that holds this whole system in place. And

in biological terms, it's a three way symbiosis. It's three ways that organisms are all interacting and all benefiting from the system. And in terms of the religious context, you've got this trinity. And I was just trying to think of other cases in the natural world where we see domestication taking this form of a three way symbiosis. I mean, obviously, like grass converts sunlight into chemical energy and then our

cattle eat that. But I don't know if you'd say that symbiotic for the grass, like does the grass benefit from being eaten by cattle in the same way that the plants benefit from being pollinated by the bees. Yeah, I was I was trying to think of any other examples earlier. And you know, I think you can sort of stretch it and apply it to to to other organisms. But it it's it's hard to think of an example where it applies so perfectly and so, you know, just

so you know, symbolically. But anyway, let's get back to bees wax and some some ancient apicultural voodoo. Okay, yeah, so um yeah, So they're using bees wax for a number of things, not just magical. They're using it as an adhesive, they're using it as an embalming agent, a light source in the form of candles, and artistic medium. Um. But but magic is where it really shines. So it's it's malleable, it doesn't break down in water, it doesn't

discolor unless you put it out in the sun. And that actually makes perfect and it makes it work perfectly within their magical thinking, right because the rays of ray will actually change the color of the sacred sculpture. Uh. And it also doesn't lose its shape after being molded into its does are forms a wax figures uh that last for centuries when they are actually stored away. One of the problems here is that since so many of these wax figures from from the Egyptians. They were made

to burn, so a lot of them were burned. So you know, you you find some in tombs here and there, but but you know, but but certainly the vast majority of of the the amulets and statuettes that were created were consumed by fire. It's it's the same reason that a future generations of archaeologists aren't going to find all that many intact pinatas to study from our culture exactly. So there are a few different different accounts that that that Kritsky rolls through that that that help help us

understand the use of these wax uh magical icons. So the Salt Papyrus, that's the one that that original quote was from about the Tears of Ray. It describes how wax quote could be used to ensure the destroy aduction of Seth, the god of confusion, disorder and violence and the murderer of Osiris unquote. So simply you'd make a bees wax likeness of your enemy and you burn them to quote kill the name of Seth. That is too cool. Yeah, I mean it's like I want to do that right now. Yeah,

that this principle is just too good. And and it doesn't just work for destruction. It can work multiple ways. You might say the wax magic go. It's a two way street. Because there's one great story in the Tears of Ray also that that recounts the Twelfth Dynasty myth of a priest named web b Owner, not Webinar but web Owner. Yeah, I ket I kept reading it my head his webinar to who and like, like webinars, this

guy has some nefarious intentions. He makes a wax crocodile and then he throws it into a pond where his wife's lover is having a nice bath. And then the wax cry goodile comes to life, eats the person, and then vanishes. And then the priest comes back and can summon the crocodile from the pond and turn it back into wax. Yeah, And he does so in the presence of the Pharaoh. And then the Pharaoh observes this and says uh. And after after observing this magic, says, oh, well,

you're right, there's the lover right there. Um. Oh wait, yeah, so he turned sentenced him to death. Sorry we should have said. He turns it back into wax, and that what it It vomits up the lover. Yeah, and and then the pharaoh says, well, there's the lover. Your story checks out. I sentenced him to death. And so then, uh, the priest here turns the wax crocodile back into a real crocodile. It eats the lover and this time vanishes for good into the water. So that that is a

great myth. That is awesome. Yeah, I love it. I mean, you have you have statues becoming real creatures and then turning back into statues, and it's uh, it's it's a fun one. In addition to these stories, though again, we do find wax amulets, including as offering tables, winged sun discs, uh tiets which are isis symbols, and collars. Also animals, such as one of a hippo, which it said can can be destroyed in order to slaughter an actual hippo. What you can burn the wax hippo to kill the

real hip. Yeah, some more of this, the symbolic magic of burning the uh the likeness in order to harm or destroy the actual thing. You wonder how ideas like that persisted, if they if they have a guarantee. I feel like some some ambiguity had to be built into it, because otherwise people would kind of observe that they were

burning wax hippos and not killing their hippo every time. Yeah, I'm thinking it had to you would probably something you would do in addition to taking direct physical action against the hippo. Oh, I can see that. Yeah, like it increases your chances of defeating the hippo with the spear. Yeah, there's because there's also a thirteenth dynasty myth that alleges that the pharaoh neck and Ebo used rituals and tailing

little wax ships to secure victories against the Persians. And there's not a lot of additional data there, but I can either imagine it a as a as a ritual that's carried out in addition to military action as a way to sort of bless your military action, or I couldn't In the back of my mind, I couldn't help but think, well, maybe this guy just had like wax models of his units and it was like war gaming it out on the table before him, and perhaps maybe

an onlooker thought, hey, he's practicing magic here. Clearly he's using little likenesses of the ships in order to magically secure victory. Well, there there is a lot of ambiguity, as we've been saying, between functional uses and magical uses, and this definitely comes through as as we mentioned earlier in medicine, because like we said, they do use honey

for a lot of medical practices, honey and bees wax both. Yeah, apparently they're they're over five hundred documented uh prescriptions that use honey and um. A lot of times it's just about making the thing that you're eating more palatable. You know, it's a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. That's not to be discounted. I mean, that is legitimate medical technology if it eases the if it eases the application of a medicine, and in other times it is

you know, an active ingredient in the medication. Yeah, there is one thing I had to relate from the book that talks about how the The Ever's Papyrus, you know, it's famous papyrus from ancient Egypt describes several ways of treating constipation, which it calls quote to open the belly, which I don't know when I pictured that, I see, uh what it is described in Jurassic Park that the velociraptor does with its claw, you know, split spills your

intestines out everywhere. But no, this this is the cure constipation. So one of the cures it offers for constipation is this. You get some milk, you get some honey, and you get watched sycamore figs. Then you boil that mix you're down, and then you run it through a strainer and then you drink this for four days. And apparently it worked pretty well at curing constipation. But it worked a little too well because some patients had their constipation so decisively

cured that they ended up with a pro lapsed anus. Uh. And so what do you do to help this poor patient that now has a pro lapsed anus. Well, you mix up a bomb of salt, oil and honey and then you apply directly to the anus for another four days. So again the use of honey. The honey makes the

anus go out. The honey makes the anus come back in, or maybe it doesn't make it come back in, but maybe just eases some of the discomfort you and it it's certainly it's we Even modern studies have documented the use of of honey as a way to to treat cuts and burns to alleviate the symptoms in the pain they're in. Yeah, it has legitimate medical potential. Yeah, as um, as Critsky points out in his book, it has osmotic potential. So it's you know, it's this this viscous um substance.

There's not a lot of liquid in there, so it can actually suck the fluid out of bacteria and in doing so less than bacterial infections. I mean, honey has natural antimicrobial properties. Yeah. Um. I think part of this is just due to its pH right as low pH, meaning it's acidic, but it also has other chemical properties that's right. Um. Anti microbial activity in most honeyes is due to the enzomatic production of hydrogen peroxi. Okay, so

the fizzy stuff. And I mean additionally to you're you're putting honey on a wound, it it can it can maintain, it maintains a moist wound condition. That high viscosity helps to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. If your wound is caked in honey. Uh, nothing's necessarily going to

get through that that honey layer on top. As delicious as it may say, you and uh, you know in many reports, Um, there are many reports out there of of of honey being used very effectively as addressing for wounds, burns, skin ulcers, and inflammations. Uh. With the the antibacterial properties of honey speeding up the growth of new tissue to heal the wound. Studies have actually found that that honey can reduce healing times in patients suffering mild to moderate

burn wounds. That's cool, yeah, But of course, getting back to the ancient world, the Ebers Papyrus also has some other recommendations. Yes, it does prescribe honey for treating urinary problems if you p too much or if it hurts when you do. Mixtures containing honey were recommended. I don't know to what extent that actually would have been effective, or if it was, if the honey was what was

responsible for it. But the honey also was used in a mixture of some genuinely gross sounding prophylactic devices for contraception. Other ingredients were things like crocodile feces and sour milk, and essentially it's a female condom aid. Out of this the grossest combination of substances you can find, but included honey. Um and uh, and I know Chrisky points out that it's possible some studies have suggested that the sour milk could have actually had spermicidal properties to it, so this

may have been partially effective. But this is not a recommendation that you try any of these mixtures at home. Yeah, don't do not do not try this at home. Um. You know, of course, in talking about all of this too, the placebo effect has to be huge too, because we've discussed how that this sort of Uh. I think you've brought it up that the something happened scenario, right, you felt something right, uh? In in this case, it could just be that's the sweet sensation of of tasting honey. Yeah.

I've actually mentioned before this is something that comes up a lot. And on another podcast I listened to sometimes called Sawbones, Yeah, where they talk about weird applications of medicine throughout history. In fact, my wife Rachel told me that they have an episode on honey. I haven't had a chance to listen to it, but which should We should check that out indeed, Um, yeah, I would love to hear because I I know of of a few other uses of honey. Uh. In in medicine that are

kind of strange. But I would love to hear a complete overall examination of different cultures in their use of honey. Yeah, and and those guys are always pretty funny, so that

should be a good one, alright. So we have talked about the healing power of honey, the magical use of honey, the bee keeping techniques that the ancient Egyptians seemed to utilize to get the honey and the wax from the bees, and before that we talked about the way the bees produce honey to begin with, and why they evolved into

this curious state. I really am fascinated by the emergence of apriculture as as just one incarnation of agriculture and the domestication of animals as a technology in human history, because I think this is often overlooked when thinking about

what technology is. I think of technology these days and I just think of electronics, and I always have to remember to broaden my mind, and and if I try to broaden my mind, I go from electronics to other mechanical inanimate objects that we use as tools to accomplish goals in smart ways. But it really shouldn't even just be inanimate objects, because really the control of other living organisms to accomplish goals should be thought of as a technology.

And I think this is one of the most complex and fascinating ones that we have, that we've created a relationship with a symbiotic relationship in nature that already exists between flowers and bees and made it work to our advantage. There's something very beautiful and very weird about that. If you can just step back for a moment and look at this as an alien, would uh that we keep insects in containers that fertilize the plants that grow all

over the earth and make sweet food and medicine for us. Yeah, it's crazy and it's uh and indeed it is a true technology, and it's one that, like like the Pyramids, has stood the test of times. As Kritsky points out, you can you can find traditional Egyptian beekeepers to this day that are using some of the same techniques that that that would have been used in ancient times. Yeah, and I think this is just one more example of something that I think is sort of a recent theme

on this show. Something we like to talk about that um that that ancient cultures or cultures that are pre modern technology, before electronics, before uh, you know, steam powered industry or anything like that. We're not stupid. I think it's easy for people to think, oh, they didn't have any of the technology we have, they must have been dumb. They weren't at all. They were amazingly clever. I think, in many ways, probably more clever than us because they

didn't have as much easy uh they did. They didn't have an easy foothold like we did to make new advances. So they were working with what they had and and when you see the innovations they came up with, it's astounding. Indeed. So hey, let's go ahead and get mr Kritsky on the phone here and we will ask him just a few follow up questions about his book, The Tears of Ray. All right, Professor Chritsky, thank you for joining us here on the podcast to discuss your excellent book, The Tears

of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt. Yeah. I think Robert and I both really enjoyed this book, so thank you for writing it. In addition to thank you for joining us, well, thank you very much. It's a it's great to be here. So just to kick things off of how did you first become interested in ancient Egyptian bee keeping. Oh, I've been a frustrated historian for many,

many years. And uh, my my interest in egyptology and and insects salt sort of happened about the same time in my early teen years living in Miami, Florida, and uh, I remember walking home uh and seeing a hy i'ld nest of honeycomb that had fallen on the ground, and I collected out all the uh the bees and put them into I was a nerd. I put them in test tubes and took him up into my room and watched them develop, and ended taking to the school and they had him on display for several days. And that

got my interest in honey bees. My interest in egypology happened a few weeks later. I was going to a parochial institution that was a very creationist in his orientation, and they started talking about Noah's flood and Usher's chronology and said that, uh, the flood occurred in b C. And that seemed kind of interesting to me because I've

seen dates that pertained to each colleges seemed older. So I looked went and started reading books on on ancient East but it found that the Pyramids brot five years before the flood and that it was a real, uh, real enlightening experience. Like, am I the only one that's seen this? You know, must have built them very sturdy? Oh that's right, that you know, the flood that created that, that that carved out the Grand Canyon didn't destroy the Pyramids.

So anyway, that that that really got me going. And but I also got fascinated with Egyptology at that time, and even even while I was working at my PhD in entomology. I remember that was when the King Tut exhibit what I was touring for the first time in the late seventies and going to the Egyptology section at the University of Illinois Library and just sitting on the floor and pulling off every volume one after the other looking for any kind of insect association and insect reference.

And that's how it started, uh, wanting to sort of annoy my high school teachers and then getting caught up in the King Tut craze. That was when Steve Martin did that wonderful song on Saturday Night Live, so it was a way to get caught up in that as well. So Dr Krisky, What would you say about how the ancient Egyptian treatment of bee keeping the apriculture technology. Uh, what does that reveal about the ancient Egyptian culture? What what does their technology say about who these people were

and what they believe? Well, the the aspect of course, the title of the book is the Tears of Ray, and there is a papyrus from three uh b c. Which gives the whole story about what the Egyptians thought, uh bees are about. And that that the the statement that's in this papyrus UH that wrote UH that the god Ray wept and the tears from his eyes fell on the ground and turned into a bee. And the bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers of every plant. And so wax was made and also

honey out of the tears of Ray. And so for the Egyptians, honey was a gift of the Sun God, and that made it very very important to them. Not only was an important commodity as those sweetener, it was used in medicine, it was used in uh and UH the wax was very important and as in medicine as well along with honey, but also as a as a

magical substance. All this came from these these in x that were essentially the manifestation of the gods tears, and so that that made honey quite valuable from a theological perspective, but also from a biological perspective as well. And there even in their their temples, the Sun Temple, for example, from the fifth dynoce of No Australiani, there's this wonderful

relief that shows beekeeping. And so here's something that I don't I've I've been to a lot of cathedrals and temples and churches around the world, and I've not seen displays about beekeeping in there. So that puts in a whole different perspective. Now, in uh, in your research, am I correct in reading that you at one point became

locked inside of a tomb? Yes, that happened though. That was I was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt in the early eighties, and uh was I was teaching in Many at many A University, about a hundred fifty miles south of Cairo, and as part of my research, I was I was just visiting archaeological sites to find any kind of a sect carving and references to insects and what have you visited ninety four archaeological sites, and Uh, I was getting so well known in the area that I

was even asked by members of the Forebay Commission if I would meet guests and take them on tours. And one instance was the American ambassador to Egypt he Uh. He and his wife and their son came down to Menua for a tour of the antiquities, and of course his excellency was received a government to escort everywhere he was going, and and the ambassador's son and I went

off on our own. And while we were down in an underground acropolis, UH, sandstorm blew up and uh they grabbed the ambassador and his wife and escorted them to the rest house, and UH we weren't there. And I was told later that he looked around and said, where's my son, and this UH military official responded, he is safe, your excellency. He has locked in the tomb. And so, of course that we had two guards. We were in

any real danger. And it wasn't like it was like air tight, We're gonna suffocate, because you actually see through cracks from the door. So his son and I started exploring on our own while we were waiting. We were there about forty five minutes and went down one UH shaft and found a small UH coffin that would have held up mummified ibis bird. We found a crocodile skull. There was there was mummy linen everywhere because this was such a it was an important underground animal necropolis. So

it was quite an exciting time. It's one of those few things that Uh, I never expected to do, and it's something that doesn't happen to a lot of people. You know, the mummified animals you mentioned that relates back to something I knew you mentioned in the book, but I didn't have a time to look up on the side as you mentioned the crocodile Apolis, which sounded fascinating to me. What's the deal with that crocodile Opolis? Uh. That was a city that was prominent during the toll

Make period later in an ancient uh Egypt. UH and UH they were the crocodile god was the god so back, and so crocodile Opolis was associated with that deity. And the reference in the book talked about feeding crocodiles a food that was also laced with with honey. Oh. Yeah. So, one of the things that you point out in the book, and I noticed even before you pointed it out, in several of the different artworks and carvings, is the variable

number of legs in the depictions of bees. Like sometimes you would see with apparently three legs, which sort of makes sense because it seems like maybe if you're looking from one side, each leg could represent a pair. But then other times you'd see what looked to me like four legs or maybe five legs, depending on how you interpreted, one little uh strand coming out the back of the bee.

And this, this rang a bell in my mind. And I remember that there is a passage in the Book of Leviticus and Leviticus eleven that talks about winged insects with four legs, and I just thought that was a kind of strange coincidence. Now, there are obviously a lot of ways you might explain a glyph of a bee or an illustration of a bee in the ancient world

having a different number of legs. But do you think this was a widespread belief in the ancient Near East that there were insects with four legs or is this just conservation of detail? Well, and in the case of the Egyptian honeybee, the most exact carvings show to be having uh four legs oriented forward and then the hind leg is actually superimposed on the abdomen, and in some instances that wasn't drawn in or was very lightly carved in, so it doesn't stand out because it's actually always super

imposed on the abdomen itself. And uh some on almost all cases, you're gonna find evidence that they probably had all six legs, but they might not have carved the hind leg as detailed enough because of the abdominal structure. UH carving that that honeybee hieroglyph was quite variable. I have a chapter in the book about about how they would go about doing this, and it's all for me. It's like doing handwriting analysis if you're gonna do forensic

handwriting analysis for forgery or have you. And I found there were certain certain patterns of existent with certain certain bees and certain places of temples, for example. But uh, in general, unless if it's a very careful carving, it always has evidence of the four legs forward and then the hind legs superposed on it, but you wouldn't see the other leg on the other side of the ave been that case. But so I think you're looking at mostly uh not not necessarily being careful for the eye

of detail. But in some cases these uh uh, these details might have slowly uh given away during time through time. Interesting, So a question this this is something that that maybe didn't come up as much in the book, but it kind of relates to some previous episodes that we've we've done to the podcast the deal with with with the egyptology and animals. Did the ancient Egyptians ever use bees

as a as a weapon in any sense? I did didn't run across any example of honey bees being used as a weapon like you would see for example some of the uh medieval uh eliminated Mantage scripts and some of the references to talk about skep straw bee hives being thrown over castle walls for example, to break up a siege and things like that. So I did not find any evidence of of bees being used as a weapon per se. Uh. The difference was in in the type of hive Exyptians were using. They were clay tubes.

They would not stand to a lot of uh trauma if you will, uh. They were had fewer bees in each one than then we would have an our typical modern box. I probably five seven thousand bees as opposed to you know, thirty fifty thousand bees in a in a tall, multi store, multi boxed lank straw hive. Cool. Uh. And so I've got a couple of other ideas. I want to see what you think about about the relationship

between humans and bees and uh and be evolutions. So one of the first things I started thinking about in this bok is that bee keeping seems interesting to me and that it might be unique. And I wonder if you can think of any other examples in that it seems like a truly three way symbiotic relationship between the plants that are pollinated, the bees that produced the honey,

and then the human beekeepers. And I was trying to think of another relationship that's equally symbiotic three ways, and I couldn't quite but I wondered if you had any insight on that. Uh. Well, with regard to the bees, uh, I think humans are probably interacting with honey bees long

before we became Homo sapiens. We know now that, for example, chimpanzees will will take sticks and fashion them in different thicknesses, for example, to tear into a a wild honey bee nest and I'll even carry these these sticks around with them so they uh, you know, if if the chimpanzees are doing that, it's quite likely that the hominans, our ancestors are probably doing this as well, uh, going back

several million years. So this association with bees is very ancient in uh, in our species and probably in definitely predates some modern modern humans. So in that case that since honey bees, they're not truly be keeping their robbing, but there is the relationship that they're actually gonna be taking advantage of of the the golden sweet windfall of of a bee's nest um, and that was probably how

our our bee keeping originated. There are symbiotic relationhips that that that might involve with the three organisms, but don't necessarily involve humans. I'm trying to think. So I'm thinking of things like the fig wasps of the and things like that that you you'd see a very specialized relationship between the figs humans and and uh the wasps. And in those cases, now, in the case of Egypt today, they didn't have the fig wasps, so they were actually

scarifying the fruit to make it ripen. But and and of course that would be a three way example as well. Excellent. Yeah, I didn't even think about the fig wats. But that's that's a that's a tremendous example. That is a great question. I like, that's that's that that's coming from the side that time we thought about for my mind is really

clicking on that one. Well, well, that leads into the next question I wanted to ask, which is about the evolutionary relationship we see with other domesticated animals that that humans use for their agricultural agriculture for companionships. So we've got dogs, we've got cattle, we've got all kinds of you know, draft animals, farm animals that in many ways have very much diverged evolutionarily from their wild ancestors. And I wonder if we see anything like that with domesticated bees,

or if we ever will in the future. Um, is it because we've had a domestication relationship with bees for less time If we don't see that, I think there's no question that we've had an impact on on honeybee evolution. Case and point in your during the last fifteen hundred years when we kept bees uh in straw and wicker skep hives, the basket hives. It was very common uh in the early earlier centuries when you harvested the honey, the beekeeper and walk around, pick up the lift the

skep and it was really heavy. That would be the one that they would harvest. And the how they would harvest. They would dig a pit in the ground filled with sulfur and brimstone, what have you, and start a fire and literally knock all the bees into the fire. Now they're what they're doing is taking their best producing bees and killing them. M Um Darwin has something to say about that. And and what we're seeing is this, we have four centuries slowly been killing large numbers of of

a very good producing colonies. And then we tried to some of the Eventually we got the point where they could drive the bees out of these wicker basket hives. They would they would take the skep hive, put it in the full skep, put it upside down in a in a pail, and then have an empty skep next to it, and using pieces of board nail sort of

hold that empty scap in place. And they banged the daylights out of the side of that pail, and the bees would walk out of the full step up into the empty, empty skep and the second they could drive the bees from one hive to the next. That stopped that. We started seeing that in good numbers in the late eighteen hundreds and quite common during the UH the nineteenth century. But we for many many years had been you know,

going out and and selectively killing good producing bees. And UH a colleague of mine, UH Steve Shepherd up at the Washington State University. He has been looking at the diversity of honey bees and it's found that all the bees in the United States are all of our queens are related to a small number of of queens. It's fewer than a thousand. So we've we have dramatically produced the genetic diversity of bees over over the years as beekeepers. That may be contributing to some of the problems that

we we are having. And there's a concerted effort now Steve is doing this and others to go out all over the world and try to h improve the genetic diversity by getting UM collecting drones and getting semen UH samples to bring back for for crosses. Well, that's really fascinating. So that makes me wonder do we already have or do you ever think we will have uh, domesticated bees that are as different from the wild original hobee as say a chihuahua is from the gray wolf. Well, we

have several, we have several strains are are varieties. Now there's the and they're all APIs malifer about their their subspecies. They all from what we can tell is they all involved on their own and you know, for example, the Italian strain came from the the Alperia North and Italian what have you? Uh, we are there are has been attempts. Brother Adam was a beekeeper who was trying to uh selectively breed bees that would mature a little faster to

help produce it's it's parasite load, for example. So there are efforts to do things like that. Uh, I've not seen any real overall success that would say that it's that's uh that it's come to fruition yet, but that it is quite conceivable that we could modify bees through selective breeding to be something different. M interesting. Well, Robert, did you have something else? No, I believe that that's

that's a great place to to leave off. I just wanna I want to thank thank you again Professor Chritski for taking the time to chat with us and encourage all of our listeners. If you're if you're whether you're interested in history or or insects, um if if it's the the ancient Egyptian angle or the the beekeeping angle that that brings you in like this is just a

tremendous and accessible read on both topics. My if if I can uh the shameless plug, I will say my my previous book with Oxford was The Quest for the Perfect Hive, which is the history of the modern beehive. Excellent and how we how we got from these two highs from the Egyptians up to the through basket hives into the those white boxes that we see uh out in fields. Now, can you tell us what will the hives of the future look like? Oh? Well, that's one of the themes behind my the book The Quest of

the Perfect Hive. Is one of the things that's happened is we've stopped, we've stopped inventing. It's beginning to come back a little bit. But um, when the U during the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, beekeepers were spending a lot of money, but to buy equipment that was interchangeable, and they were buying extractors and uh uh it was rather it's rather expensive to actually retool an

entire b operation, honeybee operation. And so uh the if you went and found a beekeeping supply catalog from the nineteen twenties, it would look just like our catalogs today in some case, except they wouldn't have a styro from hives. So here we have these we have pre depression Arab bees uh uh living in hives that were invented back the night twenties, and we we've got we have their honey bee geno. And so you know, my question always

this have we found the perfect hive? And since the books come out, we're now seeing a lot of people invest uh exploring new hives. Uh. There's a couple that are really quite intriguing. The Omelet Hive out of England, which is a wonderful hive for it's it's expensive, but

it's a wonderful hive for the backyard beekeeper. We of course they might have recently heard about the flow hive that's this hive that uh you economically extract the honey from the hive through hoses, and that's that's something that's that I believe there's a kick Starter campaign to help

fund UH fund that. Uh. There there's a lot of interest in trying to improve UH bee keeping operations to encourage more people to keep bees even if they don't want to collect the honey, but just keep the pollinators around. Man the bee hive with the hoses. That sounds like

an hr Geeger kind of contract. You should you should take a look at it on They are actually able to split the honey comb and then they they the honey then flows out through through UH hoses in two containers so they don't have to take the high the frames out for extracting. Wow. Well that's fascinating. Well, uh, I guess we should wrap it up unless there's anything else you feel like you would like to say. But but I really appreciate you talking to us. I thoroughly

enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. All right, So there you have it. That book again is The Tears of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Gene Kritzky, and that is ray spelled r E. You can find that it's available in both physical and digital copies right now, and will include a link to it on the landing page for this uh WET for this episode at stuff

to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want to get in touch with us about this episode or any recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for moral this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com Like