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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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