From the Vault: Tears of Re

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, enter a kingdom within a kingdom: the remarkable honey-and-wax monarchy within a beehive and the organizational complexity of ancient Egypt. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the importance of apiculture in ancient Egypt and chat with 'The Tears of Re' author entomologist Gene Kritsky. (Previously published Mar 17, 2016)

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The vault is open and it beckons. That's right. In fact,
the vault is giving us bees this week, lots of
bees covered in bees. Yes, they're everywhere because we are
revisiting an episode that originally published March seventeenth, two thousand sixteen,

(00:27):
in which we chat with author entomologist Jean Kritsky, author
of a wonderful book titled The Tears of Ray. Yeah,
this episode was a lot of fun. Jean was great
to talk to, and I remember it fondly, as I
often do BE related topics, but especially be related topics
that can get into ancient mythology. Yeah, you have ancient

(00:48):
Egypt and honey bees. Uh, what's not to love? Author
in my eyes? All right, let's dive in. Welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetup works dot com.

(01:13):
The god Ray wept, and the tears from his eyes
fell on the ground and turned into a bee. The
bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers
of every plant, and so wax was made and also
honey out of the Tears of Ray. H Hey, welcome

(01:38):
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a beautiful
little reading. Robert, what was that? That quote comes to
us from a nine translation of a three hundred b
CE bit of writing. It's it's essentially cursive hieroglyphs, which
is called the hieratic writing. And more specifically, this wonderful

(02:00):
uh little expert comes from a book titled The Tears
of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Jean Kritzky.
And at the end of this episode we're going to
chat with the author just a little bit about some
of the material we're discussing here and about the book
The Tears of Ray. This was a very interesting book.
Robert and I both read it for this episode, and

(02:21):
it essentially it covers the relationship between the ancient Egyptians
and the honeybee, the complex economic, religious, and scientific relationship,
you might say, going back and forth between them. But
we should start, I guess with Ray, because that's the
focus of the poems segment you read at the beginning.
Who is Ray? Ray? You may be more familiar with

(02:44):
the name Raw are a uh, the sun god, the
creator god of the ancient Egyptians, as often depicted as
sort of like a bird's head, the head of a falcon,
but also a sun disc that travels across the sky
and then of as dusk it gets eaten and then
goes into the underworld. Well, actually I think those are

(03:04):
two different myths. Right, it goes into the underworld and
then comes back out. But there's another version where Ray
gets eaten and then gets re birthed. Yeah, and there's
a there's a lot of material about the like he
travels across the sky and a solar barge, and then
there's a different barge that travels through the underworld at night,
and and sometimes the additional gods on those barges. It's uh,

(03:25):
it's it's very complex. One of the things I definitely
did find out from this book is that these days,
if you want to be in line with the academic
Egyptology community, you say Ray, not Raw. Now. I I
got Raw from the movie Stargate, where Raw is the
bad guy who is essentially an alien version of an
Egyptian god. But but that that's not anymore, it's right. Yeah,

(03:49):
Plus most most Egyptologists dismiss uh Stargate as a reputable
source of real days. Yeah. I don't know why, but
but yeah, this this episode, I hopefully what we're gonna
do here is is we will will allow you to
leave the podcast with maybe a little more understanding and
respect for the kingdom of the bees and a little

(04:11):
more respect and understanding for the kingdom of ancient Egypt,
because there's a there's so much complexity in both and uh,
and it's fascinating to sort of look here at this
this kingdom within a kingdom and how they how they
were related to each other. Oh, the b kingdom within
the Egyptian yea, because because yeah, we have a monarch, uh,

(04:34):
monarchy within the honey bee hive, and then workers we
have a lot of workers toiling away involved in this industry.
And then uh, we have this we have ancient Egypt.
We have another monarchy with a very complex system of order. Uh,
A lot of industry going on, a lot of workers

(04:56):
toiling to make it all possible. And also sort of
a two ways cyber by addic symbiotic relationship. Yeah. Indeed,
but I guess we should start with the bee first,
because obviously the b pre dates ancient Egypt as a civilization,
probably not the land mass. So Robert, where do bees
come from? Well, I'm glad you asked, Joe. Let me

(05:16):
tell you about the bees. Uh, you'd have to travel
back about a hundred million maybe a hundred thirty million years,
depending on who you're talking to, all the way back
to the Cretaceous period. Okay, you'd find dinosaurs roam to
the earth. Yeah. Yeah, we're going away back here, and
you find a world rather different than the one we're
we encountered today. Uh, devoid of flowering plants and occupied

(05:39):
mostly by conifers, which depend on the wind to spread
their seats. Can you imagine that? I mean a world
where where reproduction depends entirely on the whims of the weather.
Like can you imagine if animals Because trees can't walk
around and find each other to mate, they're stuck in
place ease and bushes, you know, whatever you want. Plants

(06:02):
are not very mobile, so they essentially have to spray
their reproductive material into the air, just hoping it gets
somewhere worthwhile by chance. Yeah. Indeed, this is just an
earlier state, and there's just the the the evolution of
seed transfer. So there are no flowers and there's certainly
no pollination. Now there were There were no bees at

(06:24):
this point, but there were wasps. And these wasps were
also kind of different from the wasps that we encounter today.
They were hymenoptera, the order that wasts and bees are in. Yeah,
indeed they were, now they were, but they were carnivorous.
They preyed on spiders and other insects and many of
which in turn fed on vegetation. Uh so a lot. So,

(06:45):
so we have a traffic going on here all right.
Seeds are going into the air, the wasps are eating
the insects that live on the plants. But plant of
evolution eventually begins to make the most out of this
constant insect traffic, using it like the wind and to
carry a genetic material from plant to plant, and this
results in the rise of angiosperms. These are plants that

(07:06):
depend on insects to spread genetic material and pollen from
male plant parts called anthers to female parts called stigmas.
This is one of those moments I often want to say, like, oh,
how smart that is. It's like as if somebody planned it. Now,
of course it wasn't These are just the the wonderful
ingenuities of evolution acting upon the environment. But uh, it's

(07:29):
fascinating how things like this come about. So you have
to imagine a system where these plants are pollinating by wind,
but they have this this sperm the pollination material I
guess you would say pollen. Uh, And somehow insects start
getting this stuff on their bodies. Right, Essentially, a new
wind emerges and that wind is the movement of these insects.

(07:52):
And then, of course, once that works out for long enough,
plants sort of evolve traits to specialize in that mode
of transmission. It's no longer accident, it's how they work now.
In indeed, you see the the emergence of the delicious
nectar to sweeten the deal for the pollen carrying insects,
saying hey, come here, get all nice and covered in polony.

(08:12):
And I'm totally anthropomorphizing the entire process here, My apologies,
but but yeah, essentially bribing the insects with the with
the the delicious nectar to get them to carry the pollen,
giving them a specific reason to traffic the parts of
the plant where pollen is produced. So I can imagine
if you're some wasp d thirty five thirty million years

(08:32):
ago and you've been hunting insects. That's that's tough work,
you know, it's it's really tough. Now, if you could
just start getting all of your meals from a passive
plant that will sit there and let you just lap
up delicious sweet things from its open maw, that I mean,
what a nice deal. Yeah, Yes, suddenly there's this, there's

(08:53):
this wonderful new way to get the food you need now. Granted,
there's still there's still sort of tie to their predatory past,
and indeed today, um you'll you have you can look
at most common wasps and they're depending upon upon nectar
as their primary food, but they still have to turn
to their carnivorous ways when it comes to rearing their young,

(09:15):
implanting their young in the belly off another creature wasps.
Oh yeah, yeah, which is just a wonderful area that
we have explored in past podcast and I'm sure will
return in the future. Christian and I talked about it
in our X Files episode. Yes of course, yeah, that
parasitoid wasps are Not only is it just an endlessly

(09:35):
fascinating area, but we just get new studies each year
with either a new type of parasitoid wasp or some
new details about a species we are already familiar with. Yeah,
so the wasps evolved to to live off of what
is provided by the plants, and in an interesting way,
I think we could think about this as the plants
domesticating livestock. Yeah, the plants have domesticated the live stock

(09:59):
of in insects in order to do their bidding. And
of course the wasps are one thing, but it's the
bees where we really see this takeoff, because of course
bees evolve from wasps, they're all related. But the bees
are actually they're getting the nectar. They're bringing it back
for their young. They're they're they're they're they're creating honey,

(10:20):
they're creating these uh, these these waxy nests. They are
completely beholden to the nectar. Uh. They're no longer going
out and and specifically killing other creatures to rear their young. Okay,
so when we're talking about honey bees, true honey bees,
that this is the genus APIs right, Yes, and that's
why we also refer to it as uh is apriculture.

(10:43):
Oh yeah, bee keeping not the keeping of apes. A
fun fact to remember, by the way, next time you're
adding a dab of honey to your earl gray tea,
Is that honey is bee barf? Right? Yes? Is how
honey is produced. It's produced by uh bees grabbing some
sweet nectar, which is pretty much sugar water from plants

(11:05):
and then going through a complex process of regurgitation and evaporation. Yeah,
so they're kind of uh, you know, distilling it, refining
it through their They're just regigitation of the material, you know,
And I should I should also mentioned that, uh, when
it comes to two bees, we have bumble bees, we
have stingless bees, and we even have a few other

(11:26):
non bee species that produce honey and small amounts. But
for the most part, we're you know, we're dealing with
those uh, those APIs honey bees, which are the superstars,
the generators of like a true bounty and excess of honey,
uh in the amount that it makes sense for humans
to raise them and pillage their stores. Now, when I
was a kid, I used to wonder how we eat honey.

(11:48):
But I know bees make honey. I did not know
that they barfed honey up for us. I didn't know
that they made honey, but I didn't know what they
did with it. I was like, why do they make it?
Is it just? What is it? What's it for? Did
the bees themselves eat the honey? Yeah, they stored as
a primary food source. They also eat what is called
bee bread, which is a semiary cute name. Yeah. Yeah,

(12:09):
it's essentially like a pollen cake, you know. But yeah,
the the honey is a food source for the bee people,
if you will. Um, And they stored away and those
waxy cells in the honeycomb. But you mentioned wax. Of course,
wax is another important byproduct of bee culture. It's it's
their second great technology, yes, indeed, and uh and the

(12:33):
wax that the workers actually secrete from specialized glands on
the underside of their abdomen's wait what they secrete it? Yeah? Essentially,
you know, you can think of them as like wax nipples.
I guess, um, the bee the bees have wax nipples
and they put out the wax and what it's a
little flaky lipids for us. Yeah, And they get the
raw materials for this metabolized product through the consumption of

(12:55):
that honey and that be bread, which we already mentioned
and the be bread. Uh I should also have have
pointed out that it's essentially a collected fermented pollen. So um,
so these service the so it kind of goes around
in a circle, right, the nectar, the honey, the wax,
this whole um, this whole little little city for the insects,

(13:16):
built from the bounty of the flowers. Yeah. Now, long
before humans started formalized apriculture, before they started making bee
hives to keep bees in to sort of have an
agriculture of insects, they hunted honey. Right, there was wild
honey hunting. The same way you would hunt game in
the forest or on the savannah, you could hunt honey

(13:37):
just as it occurred in a bee hive that might
be hanging from a tree. And there are actually ancient
works of cave art that depict this. Yeah, there's still
also honey hunting traditions that survived to this day. And
it's essentially the same thing a bear does. Right of
a bear breaks into a honey hive or a honey badger,
it goes after some some bees as well. You just
you find out where the hive is, you locate it,

(13:58):
and then you you who is the best skills at
your disposal to break in there and get as much
dripping honeycomb as possible and run off with it. Now,
Krisky's book has an illustration, or not an illustration. It
does have an illustration, but also a photo of this
great cave painting from Spain that seems to depict honey
hunting from How how old is this thing? Yeah, this

(14:19):
dates back seven thousand to eight thousand years, so that
gives us a rough estimate not not not where it began,
but at least how far it probably goes. Yeah, and
so what what's depicted in the painting is this great setup.
It looks like a scene from a movie where you've
got somebody hanging from a rope apparently off a cliff,
being lowered down to an area where there's a tree

(14:42):
with a bee's nest hanging off of it, and reaching
in to grab the honey and you can see bees
swarming around the person. I mean, that's a lot of
trust in whoever's holding the rope, right, yeah, and uh
and and and you know you're just getting just the
b Jesus stung out of you the whole time. But
it's just such I mean especially in a energy density,

(15:03):
energy counsity of that of that that score. I mean,
this stuff is just it's pure gold, uh, nutritionally speaking,
so you're going to occasionally do what it takes to
get it and bring it back, not to mention the
value you're going to have bringing that stuff back to
your community. But I guess we should now look at
when when true apriculture started. When did we start having

(15:26):
bee hives where where we sort of set up an
enclosure and said bees go live in there, here's where
you should make your homes, and they obeyed. Alright, So
it's best we can tell. Bee keeping probably emerged by accident,
probably in the fertile crescent um. And probably what you
had happened was you have human industries is creating all

(15:47):
of these different pots and containers, uh for your various
agricultural efforts, and one might leave a pot hanging around
somewhere unused. Suddenly some bees come in, they take up
a resident in the pot, and this could theoretically serve
as as like the first accidental bee hive that's actually

(16:08):
kept by the beekeepers and they realize, oh bees will
will will actually build their nest in this uh, the spot.
If I leave it out for them, there's a chance
I'll have my own captive honey. I've yeah. I mean
talk about turning a loss into a wind. So imagine
you know you've got this jar that you were planning
on keeping full of urgad infested rye uh, and you
go back to get it and suddenly it's full of
bees and you're like, oh man, my plans are spoiled.

(16:31):
I'm gonna get stung cleaning this thing out. But then
you realize you have access to all this sweet sweet honey. Yeah.
And and not only the honey, but the wax. The
wax is key because uh, there is evidence of lost
wax castings uh dating back to thirty BC. Now a
lost wax casting for anyone not familiar, this has to

(16:52):
do with, uh with a cast used to make uh
like a metal objects in which it's you build like
the clay or what have you, around a wax model
of the thing you're going to build, and then you
melt the wax out of there. And while you have
this mold which you can use to make metal tacks.
It's a way of turning easily multiple wax into metal,

(17:16):
which is pretty awesome. Yeah. So the only thing here
is that you don't have to be a beekeeper to
get that wax. That wax could have been obtained through
honey hunting. We just don't know. Um. But when when
it comes to actually finding the the earliest evidence of
bee raising, of bee keeping, then you really have to

(17:38):
go to the Egyptians, to the ancient Egyptians. Uh. And
this would put us around three thousand BC. That's five
thousand years ago. Yeah. I mean it's amazing just to consider,
completely separate from the topic of beekeeping, how enormously long
ancient Egypt went on. Yeah, we're talking roughly. You have

(17:59):
five thousand years of of human history wound up in
the ancient Egyptians. U A a civilization that after you know,
even when it was going it was it was an
ancient civilization. Um. And of course it's gonna it's impossible
for us to summarize, you know, thousands of years of
ancient history, the ebb and flow of political and social

(18:20):
change here. Uh. You know, in the In the same
way that Egyptian history is tied closely to the Nile,
so too is the region's history a long, twisting, swelling,
shrinking movement. Across the landscape of human history. But to summarize,
we're talking the civilization of ancient North Africa, generally attributed
to lasting from roughly thirty one hundred BC to three

(18:43):
and twenty two uh see. So that's talking about the
transition out of the Stone Age, out of the Nearithic period,
the beginning of large scale civilization in ancient Egypt until
the time I think they mark the end of it
with the time that the last hieroglyphic carvings were made
in Egypt. Yes, and it's the one in three hundred
some things. He correct. Now. You can also some historians

(19:05):
um And and authors including Jane Chrisky also go ahead
and include that Neolithic period and that would put the
beginning around fifty undred BC. So that's where you would
get a total time period of around uh five thousand,
one hundred and sixty three years of culture. Yeah. So
for those of you who think it's been forever since

(19:25):
the American Revolution or something like that, it is such
a tiny blip. Modern history is such a tiny blip
humans who really dwarfs the modern age. So you know,
that's essentially the time period we're talking about, and during
that time the ancient Egyptians demonstrated their expertise of a
number of general and highly specialized categories and skills. They

(19:49):
were accomplished farmers and engineers. They were artists and linguists.
They were soldiers, they were astrologers, they were doctors, and
much more. I mean, everyone knows about the Pyramids and
areous architectural marvel marvels that survived this day. Everyone knows
about the rich history of mummification, which we've talked about
here on the show before, but there other stuff just

(20:10):
continues continually fascinates me when I read about it. For instance,
to find out that ancient Egyptians perform surgical skin graphs
as early as eight hundred BC UM and uh, indeed,
as we're discussing in this episode, that they practice uh
the earliest known examples of apriculture. Okay, well, once Egyptian
civilization is underway, once we've got our our dynasties and

(20:33):
our organized hierarchical civilization and culture, we we should look
at the role bees and honey played in that. And
one of the first things I think we can observe
is that there is a glyph in the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphic language. It's one of their symbols, that's a honey bee.
That's right, Yeah, it's um. It shows up in some
of the earliest examples of ancient Egyptian writing. UM. In fact,

(20:57):
we we see it in use by the Old Kingdom
that's h D seven through. And we probably shouldn't try
to get too much into talking about the different ages
froch in Egypt, but essentially there's an Old Kingdom that
goes on for a long time with many Pharaonic dynasties,

(21:17):
and then there's an intermediate period that's sort of like
a Dark Age, and then there is a Middle Kingdom,
and then there's another break in that there's another intermediate period,
and then there's a new Kingdom, and then of course
there's the Greco Roman period. But but essentially coming into
the Middle Age. Yeah, but but essentially at this point,
just think of this that the Great Pyramid and the

(21:39):
Sphinx are there, they're relatively newly constructed, and there's evidence
already that the Egyptians had at that point uh mastered
to some degree beekeeping and we're producing honey Okay, Yeah,
according to um to Kritsky, here there's evidence from around
this point that you actually had a a row in

(22:01):
the in the governmental structure known as the seiler of honey.
There's an individual who was the seiler of honey, and
this at least suggests either very organized honey hunting or
quite possibly the beginnings of industrialized um beekeeping. You know,
I love this title that you see throughout ancient Egypt.

(22:21):
The seiler. Yeah, the person who seals and that that
abuse an authority. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of
our our recent episode on the INCA, and we talked
about the importance within a government, with importance within an empire,
of of having a way to of course record uh,
you know, amounts when it comes to goods, the the

(22:42):
price of goods, the exchange of goods, and then also
being able to to seal it and say this is
what is contained within and uh and someone is accountable
for it. Yeah. It's a very wonderful physical metaphor for
having the final word on something. But so we do
see in ancient in Egypt the evidence of the first

(23:02):
organized beekeeping, right. Yeah. The The current earliest known evidence
takes this uh to uh around UH hundred and thirteen
d c E and specifically, it takes us to the
solar temple chasap be Brick. So what we have here
within the ruins of this solar temple, that's again it's

(23:23):
it's devoted to to ray. We see decorative color reliefs
that show off scenes of desert wildlife, boating and beep keeping. Yeah,
and it's got these different vignettes that actually showed the stage.
I mean, it's not just sort of like a cartoon like, oh,
here are some people beekeeping it. It's sort of, uh, comprehensive.
It shows the different steps you take in order to

(23:46):
do the main jobs of a beekeeper. Yeah, and uh,
there's a certain amount of interpretation that has to take
place in figuring out exactly what they're showing and exactly
what those of vignettes are showing. They especially because some
part of it are missing. Yeah, some parts are missing
androw damage and uh and depending on what's going on there,
you know that that ends up impacting our understanding of

(24:09):
exactly how advanced they were. So for instance, that there's
one of the vignettes in particular represents a man either
using a smoker to control the bees or he's calling
a queen to enter a jug. Now, either one of
those options is very interesting, and we should talk about
what that actually means. To to smoke the bees or

(24:31):
to call the queen. Yeah, the smoking thing. I think
most people are familiar with this because if you've seen
any footage or just or even just in the course
of your life, if you've seen beekeeping, you've probably seen
people using a smoker because the smoke, uh, calms the bees.
That's a nice way. It's a nice way of putting it. Yeah,
it's uh, it's it's a weapon you get to use
against the bees so you can pill with their goods.

(24:52):
It's like saying tear gas calms the crowd. Yeah, yeah,
but it works. And when you try and figure out
exactly how this came about, you know, who knows. Somebody
was getting stung by bees and they leveled their torch
at them and they noticed the smoke helped. Or perhaps
one was making a burnt offering, and they found that
the incense, Uh, the smoke from the incense calmed the bees. Uh.

(25:15):
You know, there are a couple of different ends there. Now.
The calling is also a fascinating possibility. Whichever one he's
doing here. If he's calling it seems to be that
he's got to bee hive up to his face and
he's making sounds with his mouth into the beehive to
get the bees to do something, which which is just amazing. Now,
how exactly would this work? What would he be doing? Well,

(25:38):
it's known as is piping, and uh, it's it's a
very real thing, and it's also still practiced in some
beekeeping traditions, especially in Egypt to this day. Like even
despite all that has fallen away from ancient Egypt and
modern Egyptian culture, you still see some of these traditional
beekeeping practices that are utilized there. So essentially what's happening

(26:00):
here is a bee keeper mimics the queen's audible communication.
So the queen is pushing her thorax against the honeycomb
and vibrating her wing muscles without moving her wings. Uh,
and it creates this um. It's a it's a a
a long tone followed by a series of short burst
and I've heard it described as zeep, zeep, zeep. There's

(26:21):
also a cack cack, yeah right, yeah, yeah, So they're
there are different tones that the bees make to one
another to communicate, to signal. Essentially, what they need to
do in the next stage of a reproductive process, like
if a if a young queen is within the nest
right and specifically here, my understanding is that what the

(26:42):
the bee caller is doing is creating the sound of
an emergent virgin queen, and then that would cause the
existing monarch or another emergent queen to come forward and
fight herr and try to kill her. Uh calling her out? Yeah,
calling her out. So you're you're manipulating the bees speaking

(27:03):
their language in order to draw the queen away so
that you can put her in a bottle, move her
to another hive, and use her presence to manipulate the
uh your creation of new hives or just moving the
existing hive. Yeah. So just the idea of of a
human being able to make bee sounds to talk to
the bees is fascinating on its own. Also that they

(27:25):
figured this out in ancient Egypt, but there are other
techniques displayed at Newer Sara in these solar temple as well. Right. Yeah,
there's another vignette that seems like it shows a man
pouring something from a spout. So this might be honey
taken from the hive. It might be honey that's just
separated from the wax. They might be deluding it. Um,

(27:46):
we're deluding the honey honey with water. And I remember
reading in Krinsky's book that that that some have commented
on this and thought, well, maybe they were making meat
or something. Um, you know, because you can of course
take honey and create an alcoholic average from it. But
there's apparently no real evidence that that's what was actually
taking place here. Though they apparently did add honey, perhaps

(28:07):
in deluded form, to their alcohol. Yeah, so they sweetened
wine or beer with it, but they didn't make meat
as far as we know. As far as we know. Yeah, now,
looking at these vignettes, I wanted to observe something that
struck me as quite strange. Throughout this book and so
meaning throughout ancient Egypt, there are lots of pictures of bees.

(28:27):
I mean, this makes sense because we have this b glyph,
this standard be illustration that's part of the hieroglyphic language,
you know, the written language system. But they're also all
these illustrations of bees that appear in vignettes and carvings
throughout ancient Egypt, depicting a swarm of bees or a
bee next to a jar showing that the jar has
honey in it, or in these beekeeping scenes, and I

(28:50):
noticed very often it looks to me like these bees
do not have a correct number of legs. Indeed, yeah,
and I feel like I don't want to be pedantic here,
but often you see the bees with four legs, or
you see them with three legs. I can understand the
three legs, because we know insects have six legs. The

(29:10):
three legs maybe you're just seeing one side of the bee,
so each leg stands for a pair. But the ones
where it shows four legs or maybe five legs, like
four forward legs and one back legs sticking out, those
are strange to me, especially since there's like no animal
on earth that has an odd number of legs. But anyway,
this four legged ancient be sort of it rang a

(29:32):
bell vaguely in the back of my mind, and I
was like, where do I know that concept from before?
And it was it was it was saying to me
go back to Sunday school. So I did. I checked
it out. I looked in the Bible, and bingo in
the Bible, in in the the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus
eleven twenty to twenty three, we read about four legged

(29:53):
insects in a part of the Ancient Hebrew dietary restrictions.
So I just want to read this selection of Leviticus
from the New American Standard translations. Is this is referring
to which insects that are are kosher, Yeah, which you
can and can't eat? And so the translation reads like this,
all the winged insects that walk on all fours are

(30:15):
detestable to you. Yet these you may eat. Among the
winged insects which walk on all fours, those which have
above their feet jointed legs with which to jump on
the earth. These of them you may eat. The locust
and its kinds, and the devastating locusts and its kinds,
and the cricket in its kinds, and the grasshopper in

(30:35):
its kinds. But all other winged insects which are four footed,
are detestable to you. Now, obviously I'm not trying to
like hammer these ancient people, like what a bunch of dummies.
I mean, they weren't dummies. You wouldn't expect either the
ancient Egyptian artists who created the solar temple carving, or
any of these other carvings and illustrations. Uh, Nor would

(30:56):
you expect the Jewish author who wrote this part of
Leviticus to be kind of entomologists studying bees up close
and locusts to see how many legs they have. Right,
there's a division in Egyptian society, and the individuals who
are who are keeping the bees are probably separate from
those that are actually carving the hieroglyphics. Yeah. So I'm
certainly not saying that they're stupid. They should have known better,

(31:18):
But but it just did seem like an interesting coincidence
that multiple ancient people's would get this wrong. And also,
as I kept reading in the book, I came across
more art that depicted bees this way is on this
Old Kingdom seal amulet, on a Middle Kingdom Scarab carving,
And so it just made me wonder, is there a
widespread belief in the ancient Near East that insects had

(31:41):
four legs? Well, you know, after you brought this to
my attention, I was looking around a little about it,
and certainly there's there's a lot of just pointless information
out there, with people either using this as as an
argument against religion and against the Bible saying, Hey, they
got the number of legs on a on a on
a asshopper. Long, how wrong? How can you trust anything? Yeah?

(32:05):
I read in Food and Culture a Reader by Carol
Counahan and Penny than Estric that that possibly the I mean,
the biblical distinction here is more about insects that walk
versus those that that fly, or at least kind of
have that live in that area between true flight and
uh and walking. So in that case, it would be

(32:27):
saying something like the saying having four legs or going
on all fours, which the Bible passage says, in which
these b images indicate it's not really about counting the
number of legs. It's more just kind of like this
is in the category of things that crawl, right, that
it's a land animal and that but bees fly. Bees fly,
so they're okay. So it's more like saying, don't eat

(32:49):
that the insect land animals. But then then another thing
that comes to mind here is just the law of
conservation of detail, which is the reason that everybody in
the Simpsons would only have four digits on each hand,
and why you do see a number of bees and
other insects and cartoons that have the wrong number of limbs,

(33:11):
because ultimately, when you're recreating these things that on a smaller,
unreal scale, you are forced to to use an inaccurate
number of limbs or digits. Oh well, that seems like
a very logical explanation to me, especially for the the
illustrations of the bees. Yeah, and certainly worth remembering for
future alien civilizations that come to our plan and try

(33:34):
and figure out the Simpsons what is what are they
trying to tell us? What? What is with the fingers?
So um, it's first of all, it's it's interesting to
just discuss the importance of of honey as a trade good.
I was really fascinated by this, uh, because it's it's
Critsky points out Egyptian societies didn't a society didn't really

(33:55):
have a currency. I mean they sort of didn't. They
didn't have a physical currency, had like they had an
ideal currency which they would use to Essentially, the way
it worked is you had a measure of a certain metal,
like copper, and then you would have certain quantities of
that copper, but you wouldn't actually hold the copper in
your hand. So if you were owed, for example, five debans,

(34:19):
of copper. You would be paid five debans of copper
worth of grain or something like that. Yeah, and there
would be there would also be cases where if you
were supposed to pay or be paid in grain and
they did not have the grain, you might pay in honey.
So honey in a in a sense was the currency.
But and it was valuable for what I understand, and

(34:41):
that value would go up and down, but it was
it was a valuable commodity. It wasn't something that everybody
beating all the time. It was sort of a luxury
food item. Yeah, a luxury food item as well as
we'll discuss an item that is that is utilized in
medicine and magic. So you're saying honey was money, Yeah,
honey was money. And since honey was money, honey was

(35:01):
of course also an industry, a state run industry. Um
that they were the edge of ancient Egyptians where a
civil organization, and that's how they that's how they built
their wonders, that's how they made their honey. They had
a system of beekeepers, overseers, overseers too to look over
those overseers. They're just a whole um you know, system, uh,

(35:22):
to regulate the production of honey and then ultimately the
trade of honey with other with other cultures. But of
course the honey also had a great spiritual significance within
Egyptian religion and their their their priesthood and their mythology. Right. Yeah,
I mean we we already talked about the tears of ray.
The bee is the tear of ray, and the sun
god cries and his his tears become a gift to

(35:45):
us that gives us this sweet, sweet food. Yeah, it
is uh, it is the the product of a of
a holy animal to the ancient Egyptians and certainly too.
I mean, it's golden, It glistens when the sunlight hits it.
It appears to close. You can you can easily imagine
just carrying a little of your your symbolic, magical understanding

(36:06):
of the world into your your contemplation of honey. It's
just it's this, this potent, perfect thing. Now. Of course,
in the ancient world, we often see an association between
healing and religious ritual. That it's very likely in an

(36:28):
ancient culture that you might find the medicines and the
doctors sort of overlapping with the priesthood and the sacred
rights that there wasn't always so much of a distinction
between science based medicine and magic based medicine. And you
certainly see that come through with honey, because honey actually
does have known medical uses that are truly effective. Uh.

(36:51):
It was also used as a you know, a sort
of functional medicine, but also as a magical medicine in
ancient Egypt. That's right. Yeah, I mean we're in a
we're in a city suation where the best minds are
using the materials at hand to try and treat injuries
and disease. Some of it is working, some of it
is sort of working, some of it's not working, but
maybe it seems to work, and some of it just

(37:12):
feels right within the uh uh, you know, the framework
of their worldview. So it's interesting that Egyptian physicians who
were at the time were considered some of the best
in the world. Like this was again in ancient Egypt.
You found skin drafts taking place. Um. So, an Egyptian
physician would treat a wound, but they would also give
you a wax amulet to burn. Uh. And and this

(37:35):
is key because because because you take the wax, all right,
you make a candle from the wax or just this amulet,
and when it burns, it burns up brightly, and it
burns up completely. So symbolically and by extension magically, it
consumes the illness, burning completely. Mean there's no ash left,
no ash at all. I mean, so there's this almost

(37:56):
a magical quality to that. You'd expect ash from all
of the other burning you do in your normal life.
I mean, we all burn a lot of things, but
there's always some evidence left behind. If you can burn
this wax figuring up completely, something does seem very otherworldly
about that. Yeah, and you burn it. You burn this
thing that is made from this substance that comes from

(38:16):
the creature that in turn came from the God of
the sign. Now, speaking of the sacred or religious aspects,
I couldn't pardon me this indulgence, but I could not
help but notice that sort of understanding. The science behind
the emergence of beekeeping is to see the biological evolution
of a trinity between three organisms. So you've got your

(38:38):
auto trophes, your pollinators, and your domesticators. The auto trophes
are the plants, you know, These are the creators of
the energy in this chain, and they create nectar from sunlight,
so they turned the sunlight photo energy into sugar. Then
the pollinators, the bees in a way or sort of
the redeemers, they convert this, uh, this scant nectar that

(39:00):
the plants produce through a process of sacred barfing, into
very highly concentrated and prized, valuable honey. And then of
course the domesticators, which are the human beekeepers are I
would think of them sort of as like the order
the logos that holds this whole system in place. And
in biological terms, it's a three way symbiosis. It's three

(39:23):
ways that organisms are all interacting and all benefiting from
the system. And in terms of the religious context, you've
got this trinity. And I was just trying to think
of other cases in the natural world where we see
domestication taking this form of a three way symbiosis. I mean, obviously,
like grass converts sunlight into chemical energy and then our

(39:45):
cattle eat that. But I don't know if you'd say
that symbiotic for the grass, like does the grass benefit
from being eaten by cattle in the same way that
the plants benefit from being pollinated by the bees. Yeah,
I was I was trying to think of any other
examples earlier. And you know, I think you can sort
of stretch it and apply it to to to other organisms.

(40:07):
But it it's it's hard to think of an example
where it applies so perfectly and so, you know, just
so you know, symbolically. But anyway, let's get back to
bees wax and some some ancient apicultural voodoo. Okay, yeah,
so um yeah, So they're using bees wax for a
number of things, not just magical. They're using it as
an adhesive, they're using it as an embalming agent, a

(40:31):
light source in the form of candles, and artistic medium. Um.
But but magic is where it really shines. So it's
it's malleable, it doesn't break down in water, it doesn't
discolor unless you put it out in the sun. And
that actually makes perfect and it makes it work perfectly
within their magical thinking, right because the rays of ray

(40:52):
will actually change the color of the sacred sculpture. Uh.
And it also doesn't lose its shape after being molded
into its does are forms a wax figures uh that
last for centuries when they are actually stored away. One
of the problems here is that since so many of
these wax figures from from the Egyptians. They were made

(41:13):
to burn, so a lot of them were burned. So
you know, you you find some in tombs here and there,
but but you know, but but certainly the vast majority
of of the the amulets and statuettes that were created
were consumed by fire. It's it's the same reason that
a future generations of archaeologists aren't going to find all
that many intact pinatas to study from our culture exactly.

(41:36):
So there are a few different different accounts that that
that Kritsky rolls through that that that help help us
understand the use of these wax uh magical icons. So
the Salt Papyrus, that's the one that that original quote
was from about the Tears of Ray. It describes how

(41:56):
wax quote could be used to ensure the destroy aduction
of Seth, the god of confusion, disorder and violence and
the murderer of Osiris unquote. So simply you'd make a
bees wax likeness of your enemy and you burn them
to quote kill the name of Seth. That is too cool. Yeah,
I mean it's like I want to do that right now. Yeah,

(42:19):
that this principle is just too good. And and it
doesn't just work for destruction. It can work multiple ways.
You might say the wax magic go. It's a two
way street. Because there's one great story in the Tears
of Ray also that that recounts the Twelfth Dynasty myth
of a priest named web b Owner, not Webinar but

(42:40):
web Owner. Yeah, I ket I kept reading it my
head his webinar to who and like, like webinars, this
guy has some nefarious intentions. He makes a wax crocodile
and then he throws it into a pond where his
wife's lover is having a nice bath. And then the
wax cry goodile comes to life, eats the person, and

(43:03):
then vanishes. And then the priest comes back and can
summon the crocodile from the pond and turn it back
into wax. Yeah, And he does so in the presence
of the Pharaoh. And then the Pharaoh observes this and
says uh. And after after observing this magic, says, oh, well,
you're right, there's the lover right there. Um. Oh wait, yeah,
so he turned sentenced him to death. Sorry we should

(43:24):
have said. He turns it back into wax, and that
what it It vomits up the lover. Yeah, and and
then the pharaoh says, well, there's the lover. Your story
checks out. I sentenced him to death. And so then, uh,
the priest here turns the wax crocodile back into a
real crocodile. It eats the lover and this time vanishes

(43:45):
for good into the water. So that that is a
great myth. That is awesome. Yeah, I love it. I mean,
you have you have statues becoming real creatures and then
turning back into statues, and it's uh, it's it's a
fun one. In addition to these stories, though again, we
do find wax amulets, including as offering tables, winged sun discs,

(44:09):
uh tiets which are isis symbols, and collars. Also animals,
such as one of a hippo, which it said can
can be destroyed in order to slaughter an actual hippo.
What you can burn the wax hippo to kill the
real hip. Yeah, some more of this, the symbolic magic
of burning the uh the likeness in order to harm

(44:30):
or destroy the actual thing. You wonder how ideas like
that persisted, if they if they have a guarantee. I
feel like some some ambiguity had to be built into it,
because otherwise people would kind of observe that they were
burning wax hippos and not killing their hippo every time. Yeah,
I'm thinking it had to you would probably something you

(44:50):
would do in addition to taking direct physical action against
the hippo. Oh, I can see that. Yeah, like it
increases your chances of defeating the hippo with the spear. Yeah,
there's because there's also a thirteenth dynasty myth that alleges
that the pharaoh neck and Ebo used rituals and tailing
little wax ships to secure victories against the Persians. And

(45:13):
there's not a lot of additional data there, but I
can either imagine it a as a as a ritual
that's carried out in addition to military action as a
way to sort of bless your military action, or I
couldn't In the back of my mind, I couldn't help
but think, well, maybe this guy just had like wax
models of his units and it was like war gaming
it out on the table before him, and perhaps maybe

(45:36):
an onlooker thought, hey, he's practicing magic here. Clearly he's
using little likenesses of the ships in order to magically
secure victory. Well, there there is a lot of ambiguity,
as we've been saying, between functional uses and magical uses,
and this definitely comes through as as we mentioned earlier
in medicine, because like we said, they do use honey

(45:57):
for a lot of medical practices, honey and bees wax both. Yeah,
apparently they're they're over five hundred documented uh prescriptions that
use honey and um. A lot of times it's just
about making the thing that you're eating more palatable. You know,
it's a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
That's not to be discounted. I mean, that is legitimate

(46:18):
medical technology if it eases the if it eases the
application of a medicine, and in other times it is
you know, an active ingredient in the medication. Yeah, there
is one thing I had to relate from the book
that talks about how the The Ever's Papyrus, you know,
it's famous papyrus from ancient Egypt describes several ways of
treating constipation, which it calls quote to open the belly,

(46:41):
which I don't know when I pictured that, I see,
uh what it is described in Jurassic Park that the
velociraptor does with its claw, you know, split spills your
intestines out everywhere. But no, this this is the cure constipation.
So one of the cures it offers for constipation is this.
You get some milk, you get some honey, and you
get watched sycamore figs. Then you boil that mix you're down,

(47:03):
and then you run it through a strainer and then
you drink this for four days. And apparently it worked
pretty well at curing constipation. But it worked a little
too well because some patients had their constipation so decisively
cured that they ended up with a pro lapsed anus. Uh.
And so what do you do to help this poor
patient that now has a pro lapsed anus. Well, you

(47:26):
mix up a bomb of salt, oil and honey and
then you apply directly to the anus for another four days.
So again the use of honey. The honey makes the
anus go out. The honey makes the anus come back in,
or maybe it doesn't make it come back in, but
maybe just eases some of the discomfort you and it
it's certainly it's we Even modern studies have documented the

(47:50):
use of of honey as a way to to treat
cuts and burns to alleviate the symptoms in the pain
they're in. Yeah, it has legitimate medical potential. Yeah, as um,
as Critsky points out in his book, it has osmotic potential.
So it's you know, it's this this viscous um substance.
There's not a lot of liquid in there, so it

(48:12):
can actually suck the fluid out of bacteria and in
doing so less than bacterial infections. I mean, honey has
natural antimicrobial properties. Yeah. Um. I think part of this
is just due to its pH right as low pH,
meaning it's acidic, but it also has other chemical properties
that's right. Um. Anti microbial activity in most honeyes is

(48:33):
due to the enzomatic production of hydrogen peroxi. Okay, so
the fizzy stuff. And I mean additionally to you're you're
putting honey on a wound, it it can it can maintain,
it maintains a moist wound condition. That high viscosity helps
to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. If your
wound is caked in honey. Uh, nothing's necessarily going to

(48:55):
get through that that honey layer on top. As delicious
as it may say, you and uh, you know in
many reports, Um, there are many reports out there of
of of honey being used very effectively as addressing for wounds, burns,
skin ulcers, and inflammations. Uh. With the the antibacterial properties
of honey speeding up the growth of new tissue to
heal the wound. Studies have actually found that that honey

(49:18):
can reduce healing times in patients suffering mild to moderate
burn wounds. That's cool, yeah, But of course, getting back
to the ancient world, the Ebers Papyrus also has some
other recommendations. Yes, it does prescribe honey for treating urinary
problems if you p too much or if it hurts
when you do. Mixtures containing honey were recommended. I don't
know to what extent that actually would have been effective,

(49:41):
or if it was, if the honey was what was
responsible for it. But the honey also was used in
a mixture of some genuinely gross sounding prophylactic devices for contraception.
Other ingredients were things like crocodile feces and sour milk,
and essentially it's a female condom aid. Out of this
the grossest combination of substances you can find, but included honey.

(50:06):
Um and uh, and I know Chrisky points out that
it's possible some studies have suggested that the sour milk
could have actually had spermicidal properties to it, so this
may have been partially effective. But this is not a
recommendation that you try any of these mixtures at home. Yeah,
don't do not do not try this at home. Um.
You know, of course, in talking about all of this too,

(50:27):
the placebo effect has to be huge too, because we've
discussed how that this sort of Uh. I think you've
brought it up that the something happened scenario, right, you
felt something right, uh? In in this case, it could
just be that's the sweet sensation of of tasting honey. Yeah.
I've actually mentioned before this is something that comes up
a lot. And on another podcast I listened to sometimes

(50:48):
called Sawbones, Yeah, where they talk about weird applications of
medicine throughout history. In fact, my wife Rachel told me
that they have an episode on honey. I haven't had
a chance to listen to it, but which should We
should check that out indeed, Um, yeah, I would love
to hear because I I know of of a few
other uses of honey. Uh. In in medicine that are

(51:08):
kind of strange. But I would love to hear a
complete overall examination of different cultures in their use of honey. Yeah,
and and those guys are always pretty funny, so that
should be a good one, alright. So we have talked
about the healing power of honey, the magical use of honey,
the bee keeping techniques that the ancient Egyptians seemed to

(51:30):
utilize to get the honey and the wax from the bees,
and before that we talked about the way the bees
produce honey to begin with, and why they evolved into
this curious state. I really am fascinated by the emergence
of apriculture as as just one incarnation of agriculture and
the domestication of animals as a technology in human history,

(51:51):
because I think this is often overlooked when thinking about
what technology is. I think of technology these days and
I just think of electronics, and I always have to
remember to broaden my mind, and and if I try
to broaden my mind, I go from electronics to other
mechanical inanimate objects that we use as tools to accomplish

(52:11):
goals in smart ways. But it really shouldn't even just
be inanimate objects, because really the control of other living
organisms to accomplish goals should be thought of as a technology.
And I think this is one of the most complex
and fascinating ones that we have, that we've created a
relationship with a symbiotic relationship in nature that already exists

(52:35):
between flowers and bees and made it work to our advantage.
There's something very beautiful and very weird about that. If
you can just step back for a moment and look
at this as an alien, would uh that we keep
insects in containers that fertilize the plants that grow all
over the earth and make sweet food and medicine for us. Yeah,

(52:57):
it's crazy and it's uh and indeed it is a
true technology, and it's one that, like like the Pyramids,
has stood the test of times. As Kritsky points out,
you can you can find traditional Egyptian beekeepers to this
day that are using some of the same techniques that
that that would have been used in ancient times. Yeah,
and I think this is just one more example of

(53:18):
something that I think is sort of a recent theme
on this show. Something we like to talk about that
um that that ancient cultures or cultures that are pre
modern technology, before electronics, before uh, you know, steam powered
industry or anything like that. We're not stupid. I think
it's easy for people to think, oh, they didn't have
any of the technology we have, they must have been dumb.

(53:41):
They weren't at all. They were amazingly clever. I think,
in many ways, probably more clever than us because they
didn't have as much easy uh they did. They didn't
have an easy foothold like we did to make new advances.
So they were working with what they had and and
when you see the innovations they came up with, it's astounding. Indeed.

(54:02):
So hey, let's go ahead and get mr Kritsky on
the phone here and we will ask him just a
few follow up questions about his book, The Tears of Ray.
All right, Professor Chritsky, thank you for joining us here

(54:22):
on the podcast to discuss your excellent book, The Tears
of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt. Yeah. I think
Robert and I both really enjoyed this book, so thank
you for writing it. In addition to thank you for
joining us, well, thank you very much. It's a it's
great to be here. So just to kick things off
of how did you first become interested in ancient Egyptian
bee keeping. Oh, I've been a frustrated historian for many,

(54:44):
many years. And uh, my my interest in egyptology and
and insects salt sort of happened about the same time
in my early teen years living in Miami, Florida, and uh,
I remember walking home uh and seeing a hy i'ld
nest of honeycomb that had fallen on the ground, and
I collected out all the uh the bees and put

(55:05):
them into I was a nerd. I put them in
test tubes and took him up into my room and
watched them develop, and ended taking to the school and
they had him on display for several days. And that
got my interest in honey bees. My interest in egypology
happened a few weeks later. I was going to a
parochial institution that was a very creationist in his orientation,
and they started talking about Noah's flood and Usher's chronology

(55:27):
and said that, uh, the flood occurred in b C.
And that seemed kind of interesting to me because I've
seen dates that pertained to each colleges seemed older. So
I looked went and started reading books on on ancient
East but it found that the Pyramids brot five years
before the flood and that it was a real, uh,

(55:49):
real enlightening experience. Like, am I the only one that's
seen this? You know, must have built them very sturdy?
Oh that's right, that you know, the flood that created that,
that that carved out the Grand Canyon didn't destroy the Pyramids.
So anyway, that that that really got me going. And
but I also got fascinated with Egyptology at that time,
and even even while I was working at my PhD

(56:10):
in entomology. I remember that was when the King Tut
exhibit what I was touring for the first time in
the late seventies and going to the Egyptology section at
the University of Illinois Library and just sitting on the
floor and pulling off every volume one after the other
looking for any kind of insect association and insect reference.
And that's how it started, uh, wanting to sort of

(56:31):
annoy my high school teachers and then getting caught up
in the King Tut craze. That was when Steve Martin
did that wonderful song on Saturday Night Live, so it
was a way to get caught up in that as well.
So Dr Krisky, What would you say about how the
ancient Egyptian treatment of bee keeping the apriculture technology. Uh,

(56:52):
what does that reveal about the ancient Egyptian culture? What
what does their technology say about who these people were
and what they believe? Well, the the aspect of course,
the title of the book is the Tears of Ray,
and there is a papyrus from three uh b c.
Which gives the whole story about what the Egyptians thought,

(57:14):
uh bees are about. And that that the the statement
that's in this papyrus UH that wrote UH that the
god Ray wept and the tears from his eyes fell
on the ground and turned into a bee. And the
bee made his honeycomb and busied himself with the flowers
of every plant. And so wax was made and also
honey out of the tears of Ray. And so for

(57:35):
the Egyptians, honey was a gift of the Sun God,
and that made it very very important to them. Not
only was an important commodity as those sweetener, it was
used in medicine, it was used in uh and UH
the wax was very important and as in medicine as
well along with honey, but also as a as a
magical substance. All this came from these these in x

(58:00):
that were essentially the manifestation of the gods tears, and
so that that made honey quite valuable from a theological perspective,
but also from a biological perspective as well. And there
even in their their temples, the Sun Temple, for example,
from the fifth dynoce of No Australiani, there's this wonderful
relief that shows beekeeping. And so here's something that I

(58:23):
don't I've I've been to a lot of cathedrals and
temples and churches around the world, and I've not seen
displays about beekeeping in there. So that puts in a
whole different perspective. Now, in uh, in your research, am
I correct in reading that you at one point became
locked inside of a tomb? Yes, that happened though. That
was I was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt in the

(58:47):
early eighties, and uh was I was teaching in Many
at many A University, about a hundred fifty miles south
of Cairo, and as part of my research, I was
I was just visiting archaeological sites to find any kind
of a sect carving and references to insects and what
have you visited ninety four archaeological sites, and Uh, I
was getting so well known in the area that I

(59:09):
was even asked by members of the Forebay Commission if
I would meet guests and take them on tours. And
one instance was the American ambassador to Egypt he Uh.
He and his wife and their son came down to
Menua for a tour of the antiquities, and of course
his excellency was received a government to escort everywhere he
was going, and and the ambassador's son and I went

(59:30):
off on our own. And while we were down in
an underground acropolis, UH, sandstorm blew up and uh they
grabbed the ambassador and his wife and escorted them to
the rest house, and UH we weren't there. And I
was told later that he looked around and said, where's
my son, and this UH military official responded, he is safe,

(59:52):
your excellency. He has locked in the tomb. And so,
of course that we had two guards. We were in
any real danger. And it wasn't like it was like
air tight, We're gonna suffocate, because you actually see through
cracks from the door. So his son and I started
exploring on our own while we were waiting. We were
there about forty five minutes and went down one UH
shaft and found a small UH coffin that would have

(01:00:15):
held up mummified ibis bird. We found a crocodile skull.
There was there was mummy linen everywhere because this was
such a it was an important underground animal necropolis. So
it was quite an exciting time. It's one of those
few things that Uh, I never expected to do, and
it's something that doesn't happen to a lot of people.
You know, the mummified animals you mentioned that relates back
to something I knew you mentioned in the book, but

(01:00:37):
I didn't have a time to look up on the
side as you mentioned the crocodile Apolis, which sounded fascinating
to me. What's the deal with that crocodile Opolis? Uh.
That was a city that was prominent during the toll
Make period later in an ancient uh Egypt. UH and
UH they were the crocodile god was the god so back,

(01:00:59):
and so crocodile Opolis was associated with that deity. And
the reference in the book talked about feeding crocodiles a
food that was also laced with with honey. Oh. Yeah. So,
one of the things that you point out in the book,
and I noticed even before you pointed it out, in
several of the different artworks and carvings, is the variable
number of legs in the depictions of bees. Like sometimes

(01:01:21):
you would see with apparently three legs, which sort of
makes sense because it seems like maybe if you're looking
from one side, each leg could represent a pair. But
then other times you'd see what looked to me like
four legs or maybe five legs, depending on how you interpreted,
one little uh strand coming out the back of the bee.
And this, this rang a bell in my mind. And
I remember that there is a passage in the Book

(01:01:43):
of Leviticus and Leviticus eleven that talks about winged insects
with four legs, and I just thought that was a
kind of strange coincidence. Now, there are obviously a lot
of ways you might explain a glyph of a bee
or an illustration of a bee in the ancient world
having a different number of legs. But do you think
this was a widespread belief in the ancient Near East

(01:02:05):
that there were insects with four legs or is this
just conservation of detail? Well, and in the case of
the Egyptian honeybee, the most exact carvings show to be
having uh four legs oriented forward and then the hind
leg is actually superimposed on the abdomen, and in some
instances that wasn't drawn in or was very lightly carved in,

(01:02:28):
so it doesn't stand out because it's actually always super
imposed on the abdomen itself. And uh some on almost
all cases, you're gonna find evidence that they probably had
all six legs, but they might not have carved the
hind leg as detailed enough because of the abdominal structure.
UH carving that that honeybee hieroglyph was quite variable. I

(01:02:49):
have a chapter in the book about about how they
would go about doing this, and it's all for me.
It's like doing handwriting analysis if you're gonna do forensic
handwriting analysis for forgery or have you. And I found
there were certain certain patterns of existent with certain certain
bees and certain places of temples, for example. But uh,

(01:03:10):
in general, unless if it's a very careful carving, it
always has evidence of the four legs forward and then
the hind legs superposed on it, but you wouldn't see
the other leg on the other side of the ave
been that case. But so I think you're looking at
mostly uh not not necessarily being careful for the eye
of detail. But in some cases these uh uh, these

(01:03:33):
details might have slowly uh given away during time through time. Interesting,
So a question this this is something that that maybe
didn't come up as much in the book, but it
kind of relates to some previous episodes that we've we've
done to the podcast the deal with with with the
egyptology and animals. Did the ancient Egyptians ever use bees

(01:03:55):
as a as a weapon in any sense? I did
didn't run across any example of honey bees being used
as a weapon like you would see for example some
of the uh medieval uh eliminated Mantage scripts and some
of the references to talk about skep straw bee hives
being thrown over castle walls for example, to break up

(01:04:16):
a siege and things like that. So I did not
find any evidence of of bees being used as a
weapon per se. Uh. The difference was in in the
type of hive Exyptians were using. They were clay tubes.
They would not stand to a lot of uh trauma
if you will, uh. They were had fewer bees in
each one than then we would have an our typical

(01:04:37):
modern box. I probably five seven thousand bees as opposed
to you know, thirty fifty thousand bees in a in
a tall, multi store, multi boxed lank straw hive. Cool. Uh.
And so I've got a couple of other ideas. I
want to see what you think about about the relationship
between humans and bees and uh and be evolutions. So
one of the first things I started thinking about in

(01:04:59):
this bok is that bee keeping seems interesting to me
and that it might be unique. And I wonder if
you can think of any other examples in that it
seems like a truly three way symbiotic relationship between the
plants that are pollinated, the bees that produced the honey,
and then the human beekeepers. And I was trying to
think of another relationship that's equally symbiotic three ways, and

(01:05:24):
I couldn't quite but I wondered if you had any
insight on that. Uh. Well, with regard to the bees, uh,
I think humans are probably interacting with honey bees long
before we became Homo sapiens. We know now that, for example,
chimpanzees will will take sticks and fashion them in different thicknesses,
for example, to tear into a a wild honey bee

(01:05:47):
nest and I'll even carry these these sticks around with
them so they uh, you know, if if the chimpanzees
are doing that, it's quite likely that the hominans, our
ancestors are probably doing this as well, uh, going back
several million years. So this association with bees is very
ancient in uh, in our species and probably in definitely

(01:06:10):
predates some modern modern humans. So in that case that
since honey bees, they're not truly be keeping their robbing,
but there is the relationship that they're actually gonna be
taking advantage of of the the golden sweet windfall of
of a bee's nest um, and that was probably how
our our bee keeping originated. There are symbiotic relationhips that

(01:06:30):
that that might involve with the three organisms, but don't
necessarily involve humans. I'm trying to think. So I'm thinking
of things like the fig wasps of the and things
like that that you you'd see a very specialized relationship
between the figs humans and and uh the wasps. And
in those cases, now, in the case of Egypt today,

(01:06:51):
they didn't have the fig wasps, so they were actually
scarifying the fruit to make it ripen. But and and
of course that would be a three way example as well. Excellent. Yeah,
I didn't even think about the fig wats. But that's
that's a that's a tremendous example. That is a great question.
I like, that's that's that that's coming from the side
that time we thought about for my mind is really
clicking on that one. Well, well, that leads into the

(01:07:14):
next question I wanted to ask, which is about the
evolutionary relationship we see with other domesticated animals that that
humans use for their agricultural agriculture for companionships. So we've
got dogs, we've got cattle, we've got all kinds of
you know, draft animals, farm animals that in many ways
have very much diverged evolutionarily from their wild ancestors. And

(01:07:38):
I wonder if we see anything like that with domesticated bees,
or if we ever will in the future. Um, is
it because we've had a domestication relationship with bees for
less time If we don't see that, I think there's
no question that we've had an impact on on honeybee evolution.
Case and point in your during the last fifteen hundred

(01:08:03):
years when we kept bees uh in straw and wicker
skep hives, the basket hives. It was very common uh
in the early earlier centuries when you harvested the honey,
the beekeeper and walk around, pick up the lift the
skep and it was really heavy. That would be the
one that they would harvest. And the how they would harvest.

(01:08:24):
They would dig a pit in the ground filled with
sulfur and brimstone, what have you, and start a fire
and literally knock all the bees into the fire. Now
they're what they're doing is taking their best producing bees
and killing them. M Um Darwin has something to say
about that. And and what we're seeing is this, we

(01:08:45):
have four centuries slowly been killing large numbers of of
a very good producing colonies. And then we tried to
some of the Eventually we got the point where they
could drive the bees out of these wicker basket hives.
They would they would take the skep hive, put it
in the full skep, put it upside down in a

(01:09:06):
in a pail, and then have an empty skep next
to it, and using pieces of board nail sort of
hold that empty scap in place. And they banged the
daylights out of the side of that pail, and the
bees would walk out of the full step up into
the empty, empty skep and the second they could drive
the bees from one hive to the next. That stopped that.
We started seeing that in good numbers in the late

(01:09:28):
eighteen hundreds and quite common during the UH the nineteenth century.
But we for many many years had been you know,
going out and and selectively killing good producing bees. And
UH a colleague of mine, UH Steve Shepherd up at
the Washington State University. He has been looking at the

(01:09:49):
diversity of honey bees and it's found that all the
bees in the United States are all of our queens
are related to a small number of of queens. It's
fewer than a thousand. So we've we have dramatically produced
the genetic diversity of bees over over the years as beekeepers.
That may be contributing to some of the problems that
we we are having. And there's a concerted effort now

(01:10:11):
Steve is doing this and others to go out all
over the world and try to h improve the genetic
diversity by getting UM collecting drones and getting semen UH
samples to bring back for for crosses. Well, that's really fascinating.
So that makes me wonder do we already have or
do you ever think we will have uh, domesticated bees

(01:10:34):
that are as different from the wild original hobee as
say a chihuahua is from the gray wolf. Well, we
have several, we have several strains are are varieties. Now
there's the and they're all APIs malifer about their their subspecies.
They all from what we can tell is they all
involved on their own and you know, for example, the
Italian strain came from the the Alperia North and Italian

(01:10:56):
what have you? Uh, we are there are has been attempts.
Brother Adam was a beekeeper who was trying to uh
selectively breed bees that would mature a little faster to
help produce it's it's parasite load, for example. So there
are efforts to do things like that. Uh, I've not

(01:11:18):
seen any real overall success that would say that it's
that's uh that it's come to fruition yet, but that
it is quite conceivable that we could modify bees through
selective breeding to be something different. M interesting. Well, Robert,
did you have something else? No, I believe that that's
that's a great place to to leave off. I just

(01:11:40):
wanna I want to thank thank you again Professor Chritski
for taking the time to chat with us and encourage
all of our listeners. If you're if you're whether you're
interested in history or or insects, um if if it's
the the ancient Egyptian angle or the the beekeeping angle
that that brings you in like this is just a
tremendous and accessible read on both topics. My if if

(01:12:02):
I can uh the shameless plug, I will say my
my previous book with Oxford was The Quest for the
Perfect Hive, which is the history of the modern beehive.
Excellent and how we how we got from these two
highs from the Egyptians up to the through basket hives
into the those white boxes that we see uh out
in fields. Now, can you tell us what will the
hives of the future look like? Oh? Well, that's one

(01:12:24):
of the themes behind my the book The Quest of
the Perfect Hive. Is one of the things that's happened
is we've stopped, we've stopped inventing. It's beginning to come
back a little bit. But um, when the U during
the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, beekeepers were
spending a lot of money, but to buy equipment that
was interchangeable, and they were buying extractors and uh uh

(01:12:46):
it was rather it's rather expensive to actually retool an
entire b operation, honeybee operation. And so uh the if
you went and found a beekeeping supply catalog from the
nineteen twenties, it would look just like our catalogs today
in some case, except they wouldn't have a styro from hives.
So here we have these we have pre depression Arab
bees uh uh living in hives that were invented back

(01:13:09):
the night twenties, and we we've got we have their
honey bee geno. And so you know, my question always
this have we found the perfect hive? And since the
books come out, we're now seeing a lot of people
invest uh exploring new hives. Uh. There's a couple that
are really quite intriguing. The Omelet Hive out of England,
which is a wonderful hive for it's it's expensive, but

(01:13:30):
it's a wonderful hive for the backyard beekeeper. We of
course they might have recently heard about the flow hive
that's this hive that uh you economically extract the honey
from the hive through hoses, and that's that's something that's
that I believe there's a kick Starter campaign to help
fund UH fund that. Uh. There there's a lot of
interest in trying to improve UH bee keeping operations to

(01:13:55):
encourage more people to keep bees even if they don't
want to collect the honey, but just keep the pollinators around.
Man the bee hive with the hoses. That sounds like
an hr Geeger kind of contract. You should you should
take a look at it on They are actually able
to split the honey comb and then they they the
honey then flows out through through UH hoses in two

(01:14:15):
containers so they don't have to take the high the
frames out for extracting. Wow. Well that's fascinating. Well, uh,
I guess we should wrap it up unless there's anything
else you feel like you would like to say. But
but I really appreciate you talking to us. I thoroughly
enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. All right, So

(01:14:40):
there you have it. That book again is The Tears
of Ray be Keeping an Ancient Egypt by Gene Kritzky,
and that is ray spelled r E. You can find
that it's available in both physical and digital copies right now,
and will include a link to it on the landing
page for this uh WET for this episode at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want
to get in touch with us about this episode or

(01:15:01):
any recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
can always email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for moral this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com Like