Aspects of Honeybee Natural History According to the Solega
Abstract
Honeybees and their products are highly prized by many cultures around the world, and as a result, indigenous communities have come to possess rich and detailed knowledge of the biology of these important insects. In this paper, I present an in-depth investigation into some aspects of honeybee natural history, as related to me by the Solega people of southern India. The Solega recognize, name, and exploit four honeybee species, and are well aware of the geographical and temporal distributions of each one. In spite of not being beekeepers – as they only forage for wild honey – their knowledge of obscure and complex phenomena such as honeybee gender and reproduction rivals that of comparable, non-industrial beekeeping societies. Swarming, another hard-to-understand honeybee behavior, is also accurately explained by Solega consultants. I contrast this knowledge to that of European bee-keeping cultures, as evidenced by the writings of Aristotle and 18th century European beekeepers. This paper shows that the Solega have a reliable and internally consistent body of honeybee knowledge based entirely on brief encounters with these wild, migratory insects that are present in the forest for only part of the year.
References
Aristotle. 1953. Generation of Animals, Book III. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Aristotle. 1991. History of Animals, Book IX. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Campbell, M. 2006. Busy bees: utopia, dystopia, and the very small. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36:619-642.
Dyer, F. and T. Seeley. 1994. Colony migration in the tropical honey bee Apis dorsata F. (Hymenoptera: Apidae). Insectes Sociaux 41:129-140.
Gedde, J. 1721. The English Apiary; or Compleat Bee Master. E. Curll, W. Mears, and T. Corbet, London.
Lewis, P., G. Simons and C. Fennig. 2013. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. SIL International, Dallas.
Neumann, P., N. Koeniger, G. Koeniger, S. Tingek, P. Kryger and R. Moritz. 2000. Home-site fidelity in migratory honeybees. Nature 406:474-475.
Nonaka, K. 1996. Ethnoentomology of the Central Kalahari San. African Study Monographs Suppl. 22:29-46.
Pereira, W. and A. Gupta. 1993. A dialogue on indigenous knowledge. Honey Bee 4:6-10.
Posey, D. 1978. Ethnoentomological survey of Amerind groups in lowland Latin America. The Florida Entomologist 61:225-229.
Posey, D. 1983. Folk apiculture of the Kayapo Indians of Brazil. Biotropica 15:154-158.
Posey, D. 2002. Wasps, warriors and fearless men: ethnoentomology of the Kayapó Indians of central Brazil. In Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture, edited by K. Plenderleith, Routledge, London.
Santos, G.D. and Y. Antonini. 2008. The traditional knowledge on stingless bees (Apidae: Meliponina) used by the Enawene-Nawe tribe in western Brazil. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 4. Doi: 10.1186/1746-4269-4-19.
Wyman, L. and F. Bailey. 1964. Navajo Indian Ethnoentomology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Copyright (c) 2013 Ethnobiology Letters
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content and grant Ethnobiology Letters (the “Journal”) and the Society of Ethnobiology right of first publication. Authors and the Journal agree that Ethnobiology Letters will publish the article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits others to use, distribute, and reproduce the work non-commercially, provided the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal are properly cited.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
For any reuse or redistribution of a work, users must make clear the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
In publishing with Ethnobiology Letters corresponding authors certify that they are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements. They warrant, on behalf of themselves and their co-authors, that the content is original, has not been formally published, is not under consideration, and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights. They further warrant that the material contains no matter that is scandalous, obscene, libelous, or otherwise contrary to the law.
Corresponding authors will be given an opportunity to read and correct edited proofs, but if they fail to return such corrections by the date set by the editors, production and publication may proceed without the authors’ approval of the edited proofs.
