It’s time to harvest honey from the hives. We had two hives making honey for us this year. Bees store honey in the top of their space. We use this tendency to our advantage and put hive boxes full of short honey frames on top of the hive. You can see the shorter boxes on … More Bee Report — 2017 Honey Extraction
Here is a short video showing our honey extraction this year. The beehives are homemade. The honey extractor is also homemade. See our previous post on our hives for a bit more background on the institute’s hives. We’re also looking for funding for next year’s project: reconstructing ancient Egyptian hives. We gathered 60 lb. of … More Video: Extracting Honey from Hives
Egyptian beekeeping likely predates their first mention in texts from the First Dynasty (2691–2625 BCE). Beekeeping is depicted in Egyptian art and written about in hieroglyphics. Honey, wax, and the bees themselves were important parts of the Egyptian economy. The honey was used for sacrifices and sweetening the foods of the upper classes. Wax was … More Egyptian Beekeeping Funding Proposal — 2017
We’re bullish on bees here at the Low Technology Institute. We plan to expand our existing hives to test ancient and ethnographic beekeeping methods in the coming seasons. We’ll offer regular reports on how these experiments are progressing complete with data, do-it-yourself instructions, and, yes, cautionary tales. Our first foray into ancient beekeeping techniques might … More Introducing the Bee Report — Fall 2016