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During
the spring and early summer you can often
see small stalls along the country's
highways where jars and bottles of local
honey are sold. Local honey is very
popular because of its exquisite taste and
a medium-sized jar can cost up to 100 dhs.
One has to be careful, though, when
buying, because sometimes what is sold as
local honey is not the real thing. Some
years ago I had an opportunity to find out
why local honey is so popular. For two
years in a row I had large combs of local
honey bees in my garden. The local honey
bee (Apis florea)is much smaller
than the variety that is cultivated around
the world for honey production. It is also
quite a peaceful bee, which makes it
easier to collect the honey from the comb.
My houseboy succeeded in cutting off the
part of the comb that contained the honey
without being stung. If I felt a bit
guilty in robbing the bees of the honey
they use to feed their larvae but I soon
discovered that life goes on for the bees
and new cells are made quickly to receive
the gathered nectar.
In the old
days wild honey was gathered by members of
the mountain tribes of Ras al Khaimah. In
the Dhofar in southern Oman and in Yemen
this is still the case. Twice a year
expeditions are mounted to find the wild
nests and collect the honey. The
honey-gatherers are often the only people
that penetrate the inhospitable mountains
of Jebel Samhan and similar places that
still harbour quite a diversity of Arabian
wildlife.
Nowadays
some people manage to keep wild bees in
their gardens. A bee-keeper I used to know
also told me that honey from the blossoms of
the mangrove trees would be very good, but
so far no one has exploited that
possibility.
I have
been told that the honey made of the nectar
of the 'sidr' tree (Zizyphus
spina-christi) is particularly
delicious. In Yemen the 'sidr'-honey tastes
differently even though it comes from the
same tree as the one that grows locally.
This is because the soil in Yemen is richer
and this influences the taste. It has been
used as food and medicine from the times of
the Queen of Sheba. Other Yemeni honeys have
the nectar of smaller flowering plants as
basis. Many of these plants are indigenous
to Yemen, which means that they do not occur
anywhere else. This is why Yemen is famous
for its honey and why Yemeni honey is so
expensive.
Honey has long
been an essential food stuff in this region.
For ages it used to be almost the only
source of sweetness that was available. In
addition it has many medicinal properties.
It is said to work both as an antibiotic and
as an aphrodisiac. It is a source for
vitamins and trace minerals. In Australia
medical experiments have shown that using
honey as a poultice can heal open wounds
that have been infected by strains of
bacteria that are resistant to the strongest
chemical antibiotics.
Bees gather
nectar and pollen when they visit the
blossoms of plants and trees. The pollen is
collected in small sacks located on their
hind legs. These can be observed as yellow
or white clumps on the hind legs just beside
the tip of their abdomen (see the picture of
the bee on the blue convolvulus flower).
Honey bees (Apis
mellifera) live in a strictly ordered
society that consists for a large part of
female. A typical bee colony consists of one
fertile queen, up to 80.000 sterile workers
and about 400 males called drones. Worker
bees do what their name says: they perform
all the various tasks that are necessary to
keep the colony going. They get the nectar
and pollen, flying more than100 km per day
to gather these substances, reaching speeds
of 9 to 15 km per hour. They build the cells
of the hive that store pollen and honey, as
well as the cells in which the queen lays
the eggs. Then they feed and tend the larvae
till the time that these pupate, after which
the workers cap the cells with a wax lid
until the adult bees emerge. They regulate
the temperature in the hive, keeping it cool
by wing fanning and keeping it warm by
huddling. They defend the hive against
intruders. One intruder that sometimes gets
the better of them is the Death-head
Hawkmoth. This large nocturnal moth loves to
eat honey. It approaches the nest by
emitting a whistling sound that is similar
to the specific buzz the worker bees make
when they come home from foraging food. This
specific sound tells the bees that defend
the nest that "good folk" are approaching.
The Death-head Hawkmoth is using this sound
to fool the bees into letting him steal
honey without being attacked. This strategy
does not always work as is born out by the
fact that you can often find dead Hawkmoths
underneath bee nests. The workers also take
care of the queen. The queen in turn
provides the workers with the 'queen
substance or royal jelly' that prevents
their ovaries from developing.
The male drones
serve only one purpose - they impregnate the
queen, who lays up to 1500 eggs a day.
Much has been
written about the interesting manner in
which worker bees communicate to one another
where a good source of nectar and pollen is
located. When they return from a successful
foray they walk across the cells of the nest
in a special way, called the "waggle dance".
The dance, first described by Nobel prize
winner Karl von Frisch in 1919, consists of
a series of figures on the surface of the
nest. A round dance tells the bees that the
source of food is less than 50 meters away
from the hive. A figure-of-eight dance gives
information about sources of food further
away, communicating both the direction and
the distance quite accurately. The
direction is given by the bee running along
a straight line while "waggling' her
abdomen.
A similar
type of dance is executed when a new swarm
of bees needs to find a suitable site for
building a nest. The scout bees that have
been looking for sites communicate their
findings by performing the dance on the
surface of the swarm. This process can take
several days, during which the various
locations provided by the scouts are
gradually eliminated until one favoured
location remains.
In Africa a
very interesting cooperation between bees,
birds and man has developed over the ages.
Honey gatherers from local tribes used to
follow a certain bird, called the
Honey-guide as it led them to bee's nests in
the trees or caves of the plains and
mountains. When the men had collected the
honey they would discard the hive which is
made of wax. The bird's reason for guiding
people to the bee's nests was because it
loves to eat the wax. Its stomach has
adapted especially for the digestion of this
strange food. The Honey guides are so smart,
that in time they found out that Christian
churches often had beewax candles on the
altar, and they would fly into the church
halls to steal the candles! This they were
still dependent on man but they did not need
to wait for the honey-gathering season to
get to their favourite food.
With the extended horticultural developments
in this country, keeping bees for honey
production could become quite lucrative. So
far it has only been a pass-time for
enthusiasts, but that could soon change.
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