Purpose:
Currently Beekeeping is facing an overall downward trend in practice due to multiple causes, these include but are not limited to Colony Collapse disorder, Foul Brood, and decreasing popularity (Use usda facts here). With beekeeping becoming less relevant and less practiced (without a similar decrease in honey production or consumption) brings about the question of why beekeeping was so popular to begin with. This website examines through various lenses the multifaceted ways in which bees, beekeeping, and their products have held cultural significance in societies. From the first beverage, to medical treatments, essential dietary supplements, cultural taboos, and even societal metaphors and examples honeybees are engrained in human history to time immemorial.
Our Thesis Explained:
Through our research we have found strings of commonality in the uses of honeybees. These threads focus and merge on topics of social importance, religious importance, and finally political/political underpinnings. Throughout time bees and their products have been used from medicine, to magic, monarchy, and in mythology. This exhibits that honeybees were vital to human survival and society. These honeybees were important to the everyday survival from ancient to early American people. As such honeybees cultural dominance was reflected in practices that included politics, religion, and finances.
When we began our research we had the following questions in mind:
Why where bees so important to society, what was their main functions?
How did various individual societies look at bees, or what ideas and connections were internalized by the average societal member?
Was the bee present as a symbol for anything, and if so what?
How has the usage of bees transformed to mimic the individual societal necessities?
We look at Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Medieval, and modern America to answer these questions.
What we found is that honeybees have been central to nearly every society. While they may be losing popularity today, the honeybees have exemplified what humans have perceived as the perfect paradigm for the social order. The people should be unquestioningly loyal and hardworking, the king benevolent and exacting, with laggish drones controlled. While the people did not always attempt to emulate the characteristics of bees, they did however look at the hives or the honeybee in order to explain the characteristics that society should seek to emulate. The importance of bees to the individual cultures is then reflected in how they were used intricately as sacred objects in religion, as symbols for security in politics and finances.
When we began our research we had the following questions in mind:
Why where bees so important to society, what was their main functions?
How did various individual societies look at bees, or what ideas and connections were internalized by the average societal member?
Was the bee present as a symbol for anything, and if so what?
How has the usage of bees transformed to mimic the individual societal necessities?
We look at Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Medieval, and modern America to answer these questions.
What we found is that honeybees have been central to nearly every society. While they may be losing popularity today, the honeybees have exemplified what humans have perceived as the perfect paradigm for the social order. The people should be unquestioningly loyal and hardworking, the king benevolent and exacting, with laggish drones controlled. While the people did not always attempt to emulate the characteristics of bees, they did however look at the hives or the honeybee in order to explain the characteristics that society should seek to emulate. The importance of bees to the individual cultures is then reflected in how they were used intricately as sacred objects in religion, as symbols for security in politics and finances.