Beekeeping, Ancient Egypt and the Tears of Re

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, enter a kingdom within a kingdom: the remarkable honey-and-wax monarchy within a beehive and the organizational complexity of ancient Egypt. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the importance of apiculture in ancient Egypt and chat with "The Tears of Re" author entomologist Gene Kritsky.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. The god Ray wept, and the tears from
his eyes fell on the ground and turned into a bee.

(00:23):
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. Hey, welcome
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert

(00:44):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a beautiful
little reading. Robert, what was that? That quote comes to
us from a nineteen translation of a three hundred BC
bit of writing. It's it's essentially cursive hieroglyphs, which is
called the hieratic writing. And more specifically, this wonderful uh

(01:05):
little excerpt 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

(01:25):
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 this little poems segment. You read at the beginning.
Who is Ray? Right, you may be more familiar with

(01:49):
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 course dusk it gets eaten and then
goes into the underworld. Well, actually I think those are

(02:09):
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,

(02:29):
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 y Yeah.

(02:53):
Plus most most Egyptologists dismissed uh Stargate as a reputable
source of data these days. Yeah, I don't know why,
but but yeah, this this episode, 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

(03:16):
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 because because yeah, we have a monarch, uh,

(03:38):
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, uh,

(04:00):
toiling to make it all possible. And also sort of
a two way cyberbiotics 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

(04:21):
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,
we're going away back here, and you'd find a world
rather different than the one we're we encountered today. Uh,
devoid of flowering plants and occupied mostly by conifers, which

(04:46):
depend on the wind to spread their seats. Wow. 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, trees
and bushes, you know, whatever you want. Plants are not

(05:07):
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 it'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,

(05:29):
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 some bees are. 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 along, So,

(05:50):
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 stat of this
constant insect traffic, using it like the wind, to carry
a genetic material from plant to plant, and this results
in the rise of angiosperms. These are plants that depend

(06:11):
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, which it's like as if somebody
planned it. Now, of course it wasn't. These are just
the wonderful ingenuities of evolution acting upon the environment. But uh,

(06:33):
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

(06:54):
of these insects. And then, of course it once that
works out for long enough, plants sort of evolved traits
to specialize in that mode of transmission. It's no longer
an accident. It's how they work now. In indeed, you
see the the emergence of delicious nectar to sweeten the
deal for the pollen carrying insects, saying hey, come here,

(07:14):
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 give 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 DT thirty million years ago and you've been

(07:38):
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

(07:59):
the food you need. Now. Granted, they're still they're still
sort of tied 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

(08:20):
in the belly half another creature that 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

(08:41):
new studies each year with either a new type of
parasitoid wasps 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 domestic aiding livestock. Yeah, the

(09:02):
plants have domesticated the live stock of 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

(09:22):
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 the 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

(09:44):
also refer to it as uh is apriculture. Oh yeah,
bee keepingture, 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 bar right? Yes? Is how honey is produced.
It's produced by bees grabbing some sweet nectar, which is

(10:07):
pretty much sugar water from plants and then going through
a complex process of regurgitation and evaporation. Yeah, so they're
kind of uh distilling it, refining it through their their
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 stainless bees,

(10:29):
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,

(10:50):
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 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

(11:12):
a semary 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 in 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,

(11:36):
and uh and the wax that the workers actually secrete
from specialized glands on the underside of their abdomens. 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. What it's a little flaky lipids for us. Yeah,
and they get the raw materials for this metabolized product

(11:58):
through the consumption of that honey and that be bread,
which we already mentioned and the bee bread. I should
also have have pointed out that it's essentially a collected
fermented pollen. So um, so these service there. 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

(12:22):
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

(12:43):
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 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 use the best skills at

(13:05):
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

(13:27):
gives us a rough estimate not not where it began,
but at least how far it probably goes. 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 bees nest hanging off of it and reaching

(13:49):
in to grab the honey, and you can see bees
swarming around the person I mean that's a lot of
trust and whoever's holding the rope, right, yeah, and uh
and and and you know you're just getting just the
Jesus stung out of you the whole time. But it's
just such I mean, especially in the energy density and
connicity of that of that that score. I mean, this

(14:10):
stuff is just is 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

(14:31):
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

(14:51):
different pots and containers, uh, for your various agricultural efforts,
and one might leave a pot hanging around some where unused.
Suddenly some bees come in, they take up a residence
in the pot, and this could theoretically serve as is
like the first accidental bee hive that's actually kept by

(15:13):
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 drye 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

(15:36):
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

(15:56):
do with, uh with a cast used to make uh
like a metal objects in which it's uh 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 metals.
It's a way of turning easily multiple wax into metal,

(16:20):
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

(16:43):
go to the Egyptians, to the ancient Egyptians. Uh. And
this would put us around three thousand b C. 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.

(17:03):
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

(17:23):
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

(17:47):
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 made the one in three hundred
some things. He correct. Now. You can also some historians

(18:09):
um and and authors including gene Kritsky also go ahead
and include that Neolithic period, and that would put the
beginning around fifty 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

(18:29):
American Revolution or something, like that it is such a
tiny blip. Modern history is such a tiny blip in
humans who really dwarfs the modern age. So you know,
that's essentially at 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.

(18:53):
They were accomplished farmers and engineers. They were artists and linguists,
they were soldiers, they were astrologers, they were doctors, uh,
and and much more. I mean, everyone knows about the
Pyramids and various architectural marvel marvels that survived this day.
Everyone knows about the rich history of mummification, which we've
talked about here on this show before. But there's other

(19:14):
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

(19:34):
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.

(19:55):
That's right, Yeah, it's um. It chose 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 uh seven through And we probably shouldn't try to
get too much into talking about the different ages in Egypt,

(20:16):
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,

(20:39):
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 u Kritsky
here there's evidence from around this point that you actually

(21:02):
had a role 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

(21:24):
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 recent episode on the
INCA and we talked about the importance within a government,
with importance with an empire, of of having a way
to of course record uh you know, amounts when it

(21:44):
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 fine a word
on something. But so we do see in ancient Egypt
the evidence of the first organized beekeeping, right. Yeah, the

(22:08):
the current earliest known evidence takes us uh to uh
around uh hundred and thirteen b C. And specifically it
takes us to the solar Temple chasup Be brit 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

(22:31):
decorative color reliefs that show off scenes of desert wildlife, boating,
and bee 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

(22:54):
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 parts of
it are missing. Yeah, some parts are missing and row
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

(23:17):
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

(23:38):
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. That'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 pillage their goods. It's
like saying tear gas calms the crowd. Yeah, yeah, but

(24:01):
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
instanse uh, the smoke from the incense calmed the bees. Uh,
you know, they're a couple of different ins there. Now

(24:22):
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

(24:46):
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,

(25:09):
so that 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 bursts.
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

(25:32):
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 bee
caller is doing is creating the sound of an emergent
virgin queen, and then that would cause the existing monarch

(25:55):
or another emergent queen to come forward and fight hor
her 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

(26:17):
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 sarah Any's Solar temple as well. Right, Yeah,

(26:38):
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

(26:59):
or or something. Um, you know, because you can of
course take honey and create an alcoholic beverage 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,

(27:20):
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 illustrations, part of the hieroglyphic language. You
know the written language system, but there are also all

(27:41):
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 correct number of legs. Indeed, yeah, and

(28:03):
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

(28:23):
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

(28:44):
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 the selection of Leviticus
from the New American Standard translation. This is referring to

(29:08):
which insects that are koshure, 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.

(29:30):
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,

(29:51):
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 some 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

(30:14):
who of 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

(30:34):
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

(30:56):
out there, with people either using this as as an
argument against UH religion and against the Bible, saying, hey,
they got the number of legs on a on a
on a grasshopp or 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

(31:18):
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 he 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

(31:41):
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 another thing that comes to mind here is
just the law of conservation of detail, which is the

(32:03):
reason that everybody and 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 are on a smaller, unreal scale, you
are forced to to use an inaccurate number of limbs

(32:25):
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,

(32:45):
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 did. They didn't have a physical currency. They
had like they had an ideal currency which they would

(33:07):
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

(33:30):
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 could not
have the grain, you might pay in honey. So honey
in a in a sense was the currency. Yeah. But
and it was valuable when 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

(33:51):
the time. It was sort of a luxury food item. Yeah,
a luxury food item as well as will 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

(34:12):
the ancient Egyptians were 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 to 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

(34:33):
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

(34:56):
animal to the ancient Egyptians and certainly to I mean,
it's gold, and it glistens when the sunlight hits it.
It appears to clothe 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,

(35:17):
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
doctor is sort of overlapping with the priesthood and the
sacred rights. There wasn't always so much of a distinction
between science based medicine and magic based medicine, and you

(35:39):
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 situation where the best mind, they're using

(36:01):
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, 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.

(36:21):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:05):
figuring up completely, something does seem very otherworldly about that. Yeah,
and you burn it. You burn this thing that is
made from the substance that comes from the creature that
in turn came from the God of the sun. 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

(37:28):
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

(37:53):
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

(38:15):
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.

(38:38):
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

(39:00):
you can sort of stretch it and apply it to
to to other organisms, but 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,

(39:20):
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, 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

(39:42):
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 desired form, So you know, wax figures that
last for centuries when they are actually stored away. One

(40:05):
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

(40:26):
the future generations of archaeologists aren't going to find all
that many intact pin yatas 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

(40:51):
was from, about the tears of Ray. It describes how
wax quote could be used to ensure the destruction of Seth,
the god of confusion, to order in 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,

(41:13):
I mean it's like I want to do that right now. Yeah,
this principle is just too good. 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

(41:34):
and named web Owner, not Webinar, but web Owner. Yeah.
I kept reading in my head it's 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

(41:55):
nice bath. And then the wax crocodile 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

(42:15):
this magic, says, oh, well, you're right, there's the lover
right there. Um oh wait, yeah, so he turned the
sentence him too 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

(42:37):
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 statues becoming real
creatures and then turning back into statues and it's a
it's it's a fun one. In addition to these stories,

(42:58):
though again he we do find wax amulets, including as
offering tables, winged sun discs, uh tiets which your iis,
symbols and collars. Also animals, such as one of the hippo,
which it said can can be destroyed in order to
slaughter an actual hippo. What you can burn the wax

(43:20):
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

(43:42):
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 a spear. Yeah. Because there's also a
thirteenth Dynasty myth that alleges that the pharaoh neck and

(44:05):
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

(44:26):
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

(44:50):
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

(45:12):
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 Evers Papyrus. You know, this famous
papyrus from ancient Egypt described several ways of treating constipation,

(45:35):
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

(45:57):
notched sycamore figs. Then you boil all 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 caring 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.

(46:19):
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 it just eases some of the discomfort us and

(46:43):
it it's certainly it's even modern studies have documented the
use of of honey as a way to to treat
cuts and burns, to alleviate the symptoms and the pain
they're in. Yeah, it has legitimate medical potential. Yeah, as
um As Kritsky points out in his book, it has
osmotic potential. So it's you know, it's this this viscous

(47:06):
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

(47:26):
chemical properties that's right, um, anti microbial activity, and most
honeyes is due to the enzymatic production of hydrogen peroxi. Okay,
so the fizzy stuff. Yeah. 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.

(47:49):
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 seem. And uh, you know
in many warts, um 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

(48:10):
of honey speeding up the growth of new tissue to
heal the wound. Studies have actually found that the 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 Ebbers papyrus also has some
other recommendations because it does prescribe honey for treating urinary
problems if you p too much or if it hurts

(48:32):
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

(48:55):
and essentially it's a female condom made out of this
the grossest combination of substances you can find, but included honey.
Um and uh. And I know, Kritsky points out that
it's possible some studies have suggested that the sour milk
could have actually had spermocidal properties to it, so this
may have been partially effective. But this is not a

(49:16):
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 this case, you could just

(49:37):
be that the sweet sensation of of tasting honey. Yeah.
I've actually mentioned before. This is something that comes up
a lot 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 we should. We should check that out.

(49:59):
Uh 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

(50:21):
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

(50:42):
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 on in my mind, and and if I try
to broaden my mind, I go from electronics to other

(51:04):
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

(51:26):
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

(51:51):
over the earth and make sweet food and medicine for us. Yeah,
it's crazy and it's uh and and indeed it is
a true technology, and it's one that, like like the Pyramids,
has stood the test of times. As the Kritzky points out,
you can you can find traditional Egyptian beekeepers to this
day that are using some of the same techniques that

(52:11):
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

(52:34):
it's easy for people to think, oh, that 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 didn't
have an easy foothold like we did to make new advances,
so that they were working with what they had and

(52:54):
and when you see the innovations they came up with,
it's astounding. Indeed. So hey, let's go ahead and get
uh Mr Chritsky on the phone here and we will
ask him just a few follow up questions about his book,
The Tears of Ray. Al Right, Professor Chritsky, thank you

(53:16):
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 beekeeping? Oh, I've been a frustrated historian for many,

(53:39):
many years. Uh and uh, my my interest in egyptology
and and insectsalt 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 wild nest
of honeycomb that had fallen on the ground, and I
collected out all the ease and put him into I

(54:01):
was a nerd. I put him in test tubes and
took him up into my room and watched them develop,
and ended taking him to the school and they had
him on display for several days. And that got my
interest in honeybees. My interest in knegy apology happened a
few weeks later. I was going to a parochial institution
that was a very creationist at his orientation, and they
started talking about Noah's flood and Usher's chronology and said

(54:23):
that the flood occurred in b C. And that seemed
kind of interesting to me because I've seen dates that
pertained to each college, it seemed older. So I looked,
went and started reading books on on Ancient East, but
found that the pyramids built five years before the flood.
And it was a real, uh, real enlightening experience. Like,

(54:46):
am I the only one that seen this? Must have
built them very sturdy? Oh? You know 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 was

(55:08):
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 wanting to sort of annoy my high school teachers
and then getting caught up in the King Tut craze.

(55:32):
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. What does that reveal about
the ancient Egyptian culture? What does their technology say about

(55:53):
who these people were and what they believed? 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 bees were about. And that that
the the statement that's in this papyrus UH that wrote

(56:15):
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.

(56:37):
Not only was an important commodity as a 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 insects that
were essentially the manifestation of the God's tears, and so

(56:58):
that that made honey quite valuable from a theological perspective,
but also from a biological perspective as well. And they're
even in their their temples, the Sun Temple, for example,
from the fifth dynoce of no Ausraani, there's this wonderful
relief that shows beekeeping. And so here's something that I

(57:18):
don't 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 in your research, am I correct
and reading that you at one point became locked inside
of a tomb? Yes, that happened though. That was I

(57:39):
was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt in the early eighties,
and uh it 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 insect
carving and references to insects and what have you? Visited
ninety four archaeological sites, and Uh, I was getting so

(58:03):
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 Minia for a
tour of the antiquities, and of course his excellency was
received a government to escort everywhere he was going, and

(58:23):
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

(58:45):
military official responded, he is safe, your excellency. He has
locked in the tomb. And so of course we had
we had two guards. We were in any real danger,
and it wasn't like it was like air TI 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

(59:08):
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, the 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

(59:31):
you mentioned in the book, but I didn't have a
time to look up on the side as you mentioned
the Crocodilopolis, 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

(59:52):
god was the god so back, and so crocodile Opolis
was associated with that deity. And the reference in the
book talked about feeding crocodile, 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

(01:00:16):
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

(01:00:38):
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

(01:01:00):
there were insects with four legs or is this just
conservation of detail? Well, and in the case of the
Egyptian honeybee, the most uh exact carvings show the be
having uh four legs oriented forward and then the hind
legs actually superimposed on the abdomen, and some instances that

(01:01:21):
wasn't drawn in or was very lightly carved in, so
it doesn't stand out because it's actually almost superimposed on
the abdomen itself. And uh So on almost all cases
you're gonna find evidence that they probably had all the
six legs, but they might not have carved the hind
leg as detailed enough because of the abdominal structure. Carving
that that honeybe hieroglyph was quite variable. I have a

(01:01:44):
chapter in the book about about how they would go
about doing this, and it's all for me. It was
like doing handwriting analysis if you're gonna do forensic handwriting
analysis for forgery or what have you. And I found
there were certain certain patterns that were consistent uh certain
certain bees in certain places of temples, for example. But

(01:02:05):
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, these details

(01:02:29):
might have slowly 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 Egyptology
and animals. Did the ancient Egyptians ever use bees as

(01:02:51):
a as a weapon in any sense? I didn't 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 elimited manage strips, some of the
references to talk about UH skep straw bee hives being
thrown over castle walls for example, to break up a

(01:03:11):
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 the type of
hivesriptions were using. They were clay tubes. They would not
stand to a lot of UH trauma, if you will. Uh.
They we had fewer bees in each one than than

(01:03:31):
we would have an our typical modern box. I probably
five seven thousand bees as opposed to you know, thirty
bees in a tall, multi store, multi boxed lank straw.
Five 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 evolution. So one of the first things I started

(01:03:54):
thinking about in this book 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

(01:04:18):
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

(01:04:39):
into a wild honey bee dest 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 hominins, our ancestors are probably doing this as well, uh,
going back several million years. So this is asociation with

(01:05:00):
bees is very ancient in uh, in our species and
probably 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 golden sweet windfall
of of a bees nest um. And that was probably

(01:05:21):
how are our bee keeping originated. There are symbiotic relationships
that that that might involve with the three organisms, but
don't necessarily involve humans. I'm trying to think some I'm
thinking of things like the fig wasps and things like
that that you you'd see a very specialized relationship between
the figs humans and and uh the wasps. And in

(01:05:44):
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 wasps. But that
that's it'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

(01:06:06):
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

(01:06:27):
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

(01:06:48):
no question that we've had an impact on on honeybee evolution.
Case in point, in Europe during the last fifteen hundred years,
when we kept bees so 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

(01:07:12):
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 it.
They would dig a pit in the ground filled with
sulfur and brimstone heavy 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. Uh.

(01:07:35):
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 a very good producing colonies. And
then we tried to some of the be Eventually we
got the point where they could drive the bees out
of these wicker basket hives. They would they would take

(01:07:55):
the skep hive, put in in the full skep, put
it upside down and a pail, and then have an
empty scap next to it, and using pieces of board
nail sort of hold that empty scap in place. And
then they banged the daylights out of the side of
that pail and the bees and walk out of the
full step up into the empty, empty scap In the

(01:08:15):
second they could drive the bees from one hive to
the next, So 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

(01:08:38):
of mine, UH Steve Shepard up at the Washington State University,
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 queens. It's a fewer than a thousand. So
we've we have dramatically reduced the genetic diversity of bees

(01:08:59):
over over the years as beekeepers. That may be contributing
to some of the problems that we we are having.
And there's a concerned effort now Steve is doing this
and others to go out all over the world and
try to improve the genetic diversity by getting hum collecting
drones and getting semen UH samples to bring back for

(01:09:20):
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 honeybee 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

(01:09:41):
all APIs maliferu. But their their subspecies. They all and
from what we can tell is they all evolved on
their own. And you know, for example, Italian strain came
from the the Alps area north and Olian what have you? Uh,
we are there. It has been attempts. Brother Adam was
a beekeeper who was trying who uh, selectively breed bees

(01:10:04):
that would mature a little faster to help produce it's
it's a parasite load, for example. So there are efforts
to do things like that. Uh, I've not seen any
real overall success that let's say that it's that's uh,
that it's come to fruition, but that it is quite
conceivable that we could modify bees through selective breading to

(01:10:24):
be something different. M interesting. Well, Robert, did you have
something else? No, I believe that that's that's a great
place to leave off. I just wanna I want to
thank thank you again Professor Chritsky 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

(01:10:45):
or insects, um, if it's the the ancient Egyptian angle
or the bee keeping angle that that brings you in
like this is just a tremendous and accessible read on
both topics. My if if I can, the shameless plug
you spoke with Oxford was the quest for the Perfect hive,
which is the history of the modern beehive and how
we how we got from these two pies, from the

(01:11:07):
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 question 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.

(01:11:29):
But um, when the 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, honeybe operation.
And so uh if you went and found a beekeeping

(01:11:50):
supply catalog from the nineteen twenties, it would look just
like our catalogs to day in some cases, except they
wouldn't have a styro from hives. So here we have
these we have pre depression Arab bees uh living in
hives that were invented back that eight twenties, and we
we've got we have their honey bee geno. And so
you know, my question always have we found the perfect hive?

(01:12:13):
And since the books come out, we're now seeing a
lot of people invest uh exploring new hives. 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 bee keeper.
We of course you might have recently heard about the
flow hive. That's this hive that uh economically extract the

(01:12:34):
honey from the hive through hoses and that's that's something
that's 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 pollinators around.

(01:12:54):
Oh man, the bee hive with the hoses, that sounds
like an hr geer kind of cold. You should take
a look at it all. They are actually able to
split the honey comb and then they they the honey
then flows out through through UH hoses into containers so
they don't have to take the high the frames out
for extracting. Wow. Well that's fascinating. Well, uh, I guess

(01:13:17):
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

(01:13:38):
be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Gene Kritzky, and that
is Ray spelled r E. You can find that it
is 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

(01:13:58):
can always email us at of the mind at how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
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(01:14:26):
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