BEES AND BEEKEEPING IN SOUTH INDIA

Abstract

Among insects, in fact, among the numerous lower animals, the honey bee occupies a unique position. It has been man's associate practically from prehistoric days. In view of the honey it yields and in consideration of the various virtues displayed by the creature in its, social life this creature was not only held by the ancients in high esteem but was even endowed with divine powers and became the centre for many myths and superstitions. It was probably due to such ideas that the bee was added as an insignia by great men it is said to appear on the crowns of the Egyptian kings, on the arms of the Pope and on the imperial robes of Napoleon! Honey and wax were attributed divine properties and in Christian rituals honey was given to babies in baptism and the church candles were to be of pure wax! In India, the existence of bees and the usefulness of the pro- ducts we get from them are facts well known to almost every layman. But very few among us possess any clear and definite ideas regarding the natural history of bees or about the aetiology and purpose of the useful products man gets from them. There is, of course, reference in different Indian literary and medical works to honey as Madhu and to the honey bee as Madhu makshika, (literally honey fly) the exact term by which it is known in the vernaculars, though it is scientifically incorrect to call it a fly. The little that is known of them may be more or less summed up in these statements (1) that hees abound in forests, (2) they give us some very valuable and useful pro- ducts, (3) they are a proverbially hard working and industrious lot, and (4) that they sting. All the rest regarding them has been practi- cally a sealed book to most of us. The honey bee is, therefore, one of our familiar creatures and yet one about which we really know very little !!!

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.A04903

Pages

58 - 71

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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