How Ancient Egypt's Obsession with Bees Shaped Its Culture and Medicine

**Ra, the god, wept, and the tears from his eyes fell to the earth—where they became a bee.** The bee built its comb and busied itself among the blossoms of every tree. And so wax was made, and **honey**, from the tears of Ra. This small poem survives in an Egyptian papyrus from the 9th century BCE, during the reign of the 22nd Dynasty. The ancient Egyptians had a deep connection with bees. They were also the first civilization with documented evidence of beekeeping. Archaeological records confirm its practice by the 5th Dynasty in the mid-third millennium BCE. Yet the bee appears even earlier—as a hieroglyph in an inscription bearing the name of Pharaoh Den of the 1st Dynasty, who ruled around 2950 BCE. Whether the symbol already functioned as part of the word *bit* ("honey") at that time remains uncertain. The bee—known in Middle Egyptian as *afi ne bit* ("honey fly") or simply *bit*—was the heraldic animal of Lower Egypt, the Nile Delta. This made the insect a key element of royal titulature: *Nisut-Biti* literally means "He who belongs to the sedge and the bee," with the sedge representing Upper Egypt. Thus, *Nisut-Biti* is rendered as "King of Upper and Lower Egypt." Beyond its political role—which in ancient Egypt was always sacred—the bee held immense economic significance. A papyrus records temple endowments by Pharaoh Ramses III totaling 119,663 jars of honey, amounting to between 13 and 100 metric tons of the sweet paste, depending on the size of the jars. To achieve such vast production by ancient standards, the Egyptians used horizontal stacks of clay-tube hives. Shelby Justl, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests these hives may have been strategically placed near orchards. While Egyptian bees did gather pollen and nectar from trees like the Persea *Mimusops laurifolia* (a sweet-fruited tree unrelated to the avocado, *Persea americana*) and the desert date *Balanites aegyptiaca*, they did not pollinate the far more widely cultivated date palm (*Phoenix dactylifera*) or the fig tree (*Ficus carica*). Pollen from *M. laurifolia* and *B. aegyptiaca* was found in remarkably intact honeycombs from a 19th Dynasty tomb. The tale of still-edible honey supposedly discovered by Howard Carter in Tutankhamun's tomb, however, is a myth. While honey can easily last a human lifetime if stored properly, whether it remains palatable after 3,300 years is impossible to determine without destructive testing—and such experiments have likely been avoided, at least officially, for conservation reasons. The extraordinary durability of honey is one reason the ancient Egyptians prized it so highly. Bacteria and fungi cannot survive in it; honey is fungicidal and antibacterial. It appears some 500 times in the roughly 900 surviving medical papyri of the pharaonic era. The other reason, of course, is culinary. Cane sugar was unknown in ancient Egypt. In the tomb of Rekhmire—a vizier under Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, both rulers of the 18th Dynasty—the production of a sweet delicacy is depicted in such detail that a viable baking recipe can be derived from it. But besides honey, this treat requires another key ingredient—and that will be the subject of our next installment.