Honey - The American Continent

Honey - The American Continent


As already mentioned, there were only two continents on our globe where the honeybee was non-existent, the Americas and Australia. When John Eliot translated the Bible into the language of the North American aborigines he could not even find expressive terms in their phraseology for honey and wax.

Previous to the importation of the German bees (brown or black), there were, however, other honey-collecting bees in the Americas, such as the stingless bees (Trigonae and Meliponae), the size of domestic flies, which occasionally bite like ants and then rub their poison of rancid odor into the wound. Columbus found their honey and wax in abandoned huts. The South Americans call them "Angelitos", little angels, because they do not sting. They nest, as a rule, in the hollows of dead trees, but occasionally make their own hives in the ground or attached to the branches of trees. There are evidences that the Indians cultivated them and supplied them with wooden logs and earthenware jars in which to nest.

The honey which these stingless bees produce is rather thin but of an agreeable aromatic odor; the natives even prefer it to the honey of the white man's "stinging fly" and attribute greater remedial value to it. The combs are not as regular as those of the honeybee; they form an irregular mass of cells but are occasion-ally hexagon shaped.

That honey had an important part in the lives of the natives before the discovery of America is proven by the ancient Mayan and. Aztec codices. The conquered tribes had to pay tributes of honey. The Codex Mendoza lists the tributes of seven hundred pottery jars of honey paid to Montezuma, the Aztec emperor of Mexico. Some of the sacred books mention that the conquering heroes permitted the defeated tribes to pursue pottery making and bee keeping, apparently two of their most important occupations. Many hieroglyphic carvings represent bees and honeycombs, and human figures carrying on their backs large jars, containing honey, as a tribute. (Fig. 2.)

Honey was unquestionably used as a food and for the preparation of intoxicating beverages. The Mexican mead (acan) was probably not unlike the mead of other nations. It is mentioned that it was health-giving and intoxicating, similar to the drinks made of pulque. The Mexican Indians had their bee-gods to whom they prayed for plenty of honey. There are several folk tales of the South American Indians connected with hunting for wild honey which are remarkably similar to those of the Russians, the Hindus, the African and East Indian natives.

Honeybees (Apis Mellifica) were brought to the American Continent by the Spanish, Dutch and English settlers at the end of the seventeenth century. In Mexico they were domesticated much earlier than in the United States. We find the first traces of bees in the United States in Boston in 1644, where they were imported by the English. A hurricane carried them over the Alleghany Mountains. Their tendency to migrate southward was very expressed. The bees found a new home in the United States in much the same manner as did the European settlers.

Toward the second half of the eighteenth century (1764) the bees were taken from Spanish Florida to Cuba, where, however, they did not remain very long. The planters soon annihilated them because they robbed the sugar-canes. The bees rapidly multi-plied in Cuba. M. Montelle (Choix de Lectures Geographiques et Historiques, Tome 5, Part II) says, in speaking of the island of Cuba: "When the Floridas were ceded in 1763 by Spain to England, the five or six hundred miserable beings who vegetated in those regions, took refuge in Cuba, and carried with them some Bees: these useful insects repaired to the forests, established themselves in the hollows of old trees, and multiplied with a celerity which appeared incredible. The hives yield four crops every year and the swarms succeed each other without interruption." Don Ulloa in Philosophical and Historical Memoirs, concerning the discovery by Spain, also refers to bees: "These insects multiplied to such a degree, that they spread to the mountains and were prejudicial to the sugar-canes, on which they fed. Their fecundity was so great that a hive yielded a swarm and sometimes two in a month. The wax is uncommonly white and the honey of perfect transparency and of exquisite taste." In the Barbadoes, the bees did not visit flowers but lived in the midst of sugar refineries. In Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand the bees made their appearance around 1840, in Brazil in 1848, and in Chile and Peru only in 1857.