What is In a Name? Plenty, when it comes to the Honey bee and humanity.
I think we have misunderstood the depth of the meaning of the name Apis Mellifera, [The Honey bee], and why this is important to humanity, architecture and indeed pollination, survival and sustainability.
“Apis” is the Latin word for “bee”, “mellifera”comes from the Greek “melli”, honey, and “ferre”, to bear — hence, the scientific name means the honey-bearing bee.
or so they say:
Within the Common definition.
You’ll have to be a little patient, this article questions the modern hive [ both ours as urbanised humanity and the honeybees brightly painted totally unnatural yellow modernised hives aimed to intensively farm our honeybees].
To quote Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” In this case, the name Apis Melliflera holds a thousand clues of far older and perhaps wiser, beekeeping knowledge, in the honeybee’s name;
Apis was the Ancient Egyptian bull. Apis was the most important and highly regarded bull deity of Ancient Egypt. His original name in Egyptian was Api, Hapi, or Hep. Why does this matter? Because a honey bee heart has five openings, and there was an Ancient Tradition for the calling/ catching a bee swarm, that was written of some 300 years after this deity, an extremely important one which speaks of a vaster, almost certainly wiser knowledge of apiculture than credited, save by Virgil,
and draws parallels with an era of over industrialized farming:
And Industrialized Humanity:
So can stepping back in time teach us better bee keeping and help us plan better urban buildings? First Apis, honey bee hearts and mimicing them before apparently, there was anyway to actually know the anatomy of a honey bee heart ( no microsopes in Ancient Egypt)….
Across the ancient Mediterranean there was widespread belief in the practice of bugonia, the spontaneous generation of a swarm from an ox- or bull-carcass.
The Geoponica, a Roman compendium of agricultural lore, lays out detailed instructions for this task:The beekeeper should find a building ten cubits high and the same in breadth, with equal dimensions on all sides.There should be one doorway and four windows, one in eachwall. Next he should drive an ox into it, thirty months old,well-fleshed, rather fat, then call a number of young men and have them beat it with bludgeons until they kill it.Every aperture of the animal should then be stopped with cloth, including the eyes, before the door and every window of the building are closed and sealed with clay, so that no air or wind or anything else can get in or ventilate it. After three weeks all entrances should be opened, and light allowed topass through until the room and all substances inside it are sufliciently aerated; then the door and all four windows should be closed and sealed again with clay. After eleven days the room should be opened up, whereupon it will be full of bees swarming on each other . . .and nothing left of the ox except the horns, the bones and the hair.
I gaze around at my own room, imagining those windows and that door opening, the walls inside all thrust with light; wondering if bees really were found clustering, or if they were just flies feeding on a decaying carcass.And then what am I looking at? I am looking at a bee. Alive, and crawling very slowly across the carpet. If you were to take out a knife and open her body up, youprobably wouldn’t recognise very much. A honeybee has an open circulatory system; the blood isn’t confined to arteries and veins but instead fills the body cavity, surrounding her organs in the form of that yellowish liquid you’d see oozing if you poked. But now look at her heart. A honeybee heart has five openings, each with a one-way valve; not something the bludgeoners or anyone else in ancient Rome could have known, in the absence of microscopes. Yet when I think of it now, when I picture a bee with her body opened, that account of the room with the four windows and door appears suddenly as an image of her heart. As though the room were embodying the bee, even bodying her forth; as though the wild, amorphous mass of a colony might be summoned when called by the bee’s very physical form.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings.
Jukes, Helen
In the excerpt above the Author of the very beautiful book, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings. assumes that this is something that could not have been known, yet delightfully hints it as a possibility.
The ancient knowledge we find, of apiculture outlines the importance of Apis in Ancient Egypt, points to a long held theory; that perhaps we have never taken the time to realise that we are undoing Nature’s great work, perhaps once we appreciated it more without commercialising everything, when we dabble in changing both the Earth and indeed show the typical arrogance of man against the far older and more successful evolutionary toolkit of the honeybee by interfering with the habitats of honey bees for our own benefit/ same parallel for ignoring the inherent ecological values of vernacular architecture for humanity;
Taking this possibility a little further, what if the beekeeping techniques of Ancient Egypt (still used in Egypt, today) would provide a greater source of knowledge? Than say the modern ones who by numbers and even location of the hive entrance, the many many flaws, are, along with pesticide use, damaging the bees immunity at iterated in numerous books. The Ancient Egyptian bee keeping techniques include the use of clay walls rich in natural thermodynamics, like termite mounds that use solar energy in a passive manner. a honeybee spends a great deal of time and energy regulating the hive temperature, reducing productivity and lowering immunity.
The hives that are made of logs, or indeed clay , whose rough hewn texture encourage the use of propolis a bee antiseptic glue. propolis means before the city allowing the bees a heightened sense of smell as they stand guard at the entrance of their hives, the entrance being located high up rather than low down as in the modern hive, giving them plenty of time to feel an intruder approaching.
amphorae shaped sourc:Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt.
Amphorae shaped vessels, tend to be the original shape of hives, mimic the natural nest cavity of a bee and create natural thermodynamics to help the honey bee preserve her energy expenditure used to cool or warm the hive in modern hives. Much like humanity both the honey bee and human’s face costs of not sticking to vernacular architecture, for the honey bee thermoregulation lowers her immunity, for Humanity it costs the globe; cost of heating and cooling cities to the environment
Original beehives followed the natural design of a tree cavity.
Drawing a parallel between humanity and bees, what if vernacular architecture rather than industrialised would further enhance our health? The stacking of bee boxes, the stacking of humanity in human box like apartments, painted or varnished sealed and radiating toxins, lowering the immunity of both. Vernacular architecture can be defined as unpretentious, simple, indigenous, traditional structures made of local materials and following well-tried forms and types,
In his book “Architecture without Architects,” Bernard Rudofsky, the writer, architect, collector, educator, designer, and social historian commented, “There is much to learn from architecture before it became an expert’s art.” Described as nonpedigreed architecture, vernacular. anonymous, spontaneous. indigenous. rural. Rudofsky remarks;
“There is a good deal of irony in the fact that to stave off physical and mentaldeterioration the urban dweller periodically escapes his splendidly appointed lair to seek bliss in what he thinks are primitive surroundings: a cabin. a tent, or. if he is less hidebound. a fishing village or hill town abroad. Despite his mania for mechanical comfort, his chances for finding relaxation hinge on its very absence.
By dint of logic, life in old-world communities is singularly privileged. Instead of several hours of daily travel, only a flight of steps may separate a man’s workshop or study from his living quarters. Since he himself helped to shape and preserve his environment, he never seems to tire of it.”
Drawing a parallel between humanity and bees;
Our results show that a standardized laboratory psychosocial stressor causes a greater inflammatory response in young healthy participants with an urban upbringing in the absence of pets, relative to young healthy participants with a rural upbringing in the presence of farm animals.Urbanization is on the rise, and environments offering a narrow range of microbial exposures are linked to an increased prevalence of both physical and mental disorders. Human and animal studies suggest that an overreactive immune system not only accompanies stress-associated disorders but might even be causally involved in their pathogenesis.More than 50% of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, projected to rise to 70% by 2050, with 50% of the urban population living in cities with more than 500,000 residents (1). At the same time, psychiatric disorders are more prevalent in urban vs. rural areas (2, 3). Given that psychosocial stress is a risk factor for many mental disorders (4), an altered neuronal social processing or an elevated acute cortisol stress response provide two possible distinct mechanisms underlying the higher urban prevalence of psychiatric disorders (5, 6). However, a lack of long-term and early-life exposure to stables and farm milk is also known to promote chronic inflammatory disorders, including asthma and allergies (7). Moreover, many stress-associated mental disorders are accompanied by an overreactive immune system and chronic low-grade inflammation (8, 9). Prospective human and mechanistic animal studies strengthen the idea that an exaggerated immune (re)activity plays a role in the development of mental disorders (10, 11). For example, individual differences in interleukin 6 (IL-6) secretion from ex vivo-stimulated immune cells predict susceptibility vs. resilience to a subsequently applied repeated social stressor in mice, while treatment with an anti–IL-6 antibody increases stress resilience (12). Furthermore, it is known that psychosocial stress promotes systemic immune activation and chronic low-grade inflammation (13), and that IL-6 responses to psychosocial stressors, such as the Trier social stress test (TSST) are exaggerated in those with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and increased early life stress (8). Therefore, another possible mechanism predisposing those with an urban upbringing, relative to those with a rural upbringing, to develop mental disorders in which inflammation has been identified as a risk factor, is an exaggerated inflammatory response following psychosocial stress exposure. Increased inflammation in urban environments may be due to impaired immunoregulation, which is thought to be dependent, at least in part, on reduced exposure, especially during early life (14), to microorganisms with which mammals coevolved…
Read more here; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5960295/
Building-Related Illnesses — Lung and Airway Disorders — MSD …
[Health threats for children in the modern building trade]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › …
by E Bogacka · 2002 · Cited by 3 — Higher risk of atopic diseases and bronchial asthma also arises from proliferation of fungus, bacteria and mites in modern interiors, which are quite convenient …
On the beauty of architecture before man tried to take short cuts, and, the Honey bee did better when left in a more traditional home.
Commercial Hives Might Be Saving Crops, But They’re Killing Wild Bees. … But one new study found that these expensive, hard-working commercial bees are killing off the ones who work for free. The problem lies in the diseases and parasites commercial bees are introducing to their wild relatives.
Commercial Hives Might Be Saving Crops, But They’re Killing .
I am not saying that we ought to live in trees but I am saying the parallels between the health of honey bees and humanity may well be avoided if we admit that out modernity may in fact be the harm and cause of much will ails us. I am saying that we ought to look at thermodynamics of clay for hives and that in Africa the rates of infection increased with the burgeoning of modern hives being adopted rather than looking to traditional hives, those of Ancient Egypt.
I do believe if we use the honey bee as a compass, and indeed as a model for which society can work, and a barometer for the Earth’s health we will be respecting wisdom and an evolutionary toolkit far older than our own.
Mellifera which I also think is incorrect as it denotes the European honeybee which would more aptly be Millefleur, millefleurs or mille-fleur (French mille-fleurs, literally “thousand flowers”) refers to a background style of many different small flowers and plants, usually shown on a green ground, as though growing in grass. … The plants fill the field without connecting or significantly overlapping, the need for wildflowers. And, there again our little barometer; humans need regenerative farming and wild fields.
