2. The History of Beekeeping in Egypt and Its Current Situation
Honey is a natural product produced by bees and used in Egypt not only as a sweetener but also associated with medical practices, and was deemed a poison for ghosts, demons, evil spirits, and the dead, representing a symbol of resurrection
[25][15]. The first crude examples of the honeybee hieroglyphs were carved by the Egyptians of the first dynasty, in approximately 3000 B.C.E
[2,3,4,26][2][3][4][16]. In the Nile Valley region, the bees were used as a source of honey from the earliest years; thus, bees were highly appreciated insects by the ancient Egyptians. In the old kingdom, the earliest inscription exemplifying beekeeping came from the sun temple of pharaoh Newossere in the fifth dynasty and back to 2450 B.C.E.
[27][17]. In the sun temple, a room adjacent to the central obelisk was discovered by Ludwig Borchardt in 1898 and called “The Chamber of the Seasons” as it contains reliefs of activities that happened at particular times of the year, and one of them was found to be the oldest evidence of beekeeping
[1,27][1][17]. The bas-relief from left to right shows four scenes: (I) a beekeeper working with the beehives; (II) three men pouring honey into containers; (III) two men processing honey (this scene is mostly missing); (IV) a beekeeper sealing honey in a vessel for storage
[1]. By the end of the old kingdom and during the sixth dynasty, honey production increased to the level of trading
[26][16]. During the time of the new kingdom, there were many tombs with images illustrating the practices involved in the treatment using bees and their products
[28][18]. In the tomb of the 18th Dynasty vizier Rekhmire, there were inscriptions demonstrating honeycombs gathering from large horizontal hives, as shown in
Figure 1, pouring the honey into large vessels, the successive honey sealing in diamond-shaped containers, and comb pulverizing
[1]. During the 26th dynasty, the tomb of Pabasa demonstrated one of the most famous beekeeping reliefs in Egypt, where a beekeeper is facing a group of honeybee and a series of horizontal hives with his hands held up in praise. These horizontal hives were similar to the carved hives of the old kingdom from Newossere Any’s sun temple, as shown in
Figure 2. They also authenticated the continued value of the honey and the honeybee in the ancient Egyptian times and the progress of hives types throughout the time
[1,29,30][1][19][20].
Figure 1.
Honey combs gathering from large horizontal hives in Rekhmira tomb.
Figure 2.
Beekeeping reliefs from the tomb of Pabasa and Karnak Temple (Photography by Aida Abd El-Wahed).
In the Ptolemaic Period (304–30 B.C.E.), the state taxed bee keeping and the bee derived products. In the Nile Valley, beekeeping processes and breeding programs were established, as honey was fundamental to the people’s food
[25][15]. The Egyptian mud hives (traditional bee hives) were placed in piles that could reach hundreds and were combined by pouring mortar in-between
[31,32][21][22]. In 1918, modern beekeeping started in Egypt using wooden Langstroth frames. In 1920, the first association of beekeepers was established to improve beekeeping process and develop its marketing. Since, then traditional beekeeping methods were used in parallel with modern ones.
The modern beekeeping represents 99% of the used practices in Egypt
[9].
Figure 3 illustrates the difference between the Egyptian mud traditional hives (A1-3) and the modern wooden ones (B). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), statistics on the number of beehives in Egypt between 1961–2020 have been fluctuating, as represented in
Figure 4. The number of beehives demonstrated noticeable increases between 1964–1972, 1980–1990, and 1999–2001, reaching 937,000, 1,651,000, and 1,485,000 hives, respectively, at the end of each period. In contrast, they demonstrated noticeable decreases in 1980, 1994, and 2017, reaching 858,000, 1,225,000, and 820,516 hives, respectively
[9].
Figure 3.
The Egyptian mud traditional hives (
A1
–
A3
) and modern ones (
B
). (Photo
A1
–
A3
: Dahy M. Mostafa and used with permission).
Honey bees are given special attention in Egypt because of their importance in pollination and their impact on the economy
[33][23]. The pollination is mainly conducted using the Egyptian clover blooming during June, cotton flowering during August–September, and a minor contribution of citrus in April
[31,32][21][22]. In the future, thermal stress on the Egyptian honey bee colonies will be a significant problem for beekeepers, especially during summer
[24,34][24][25].
3. Apis mellifera lamarckii Morphology
The Egyptian
A. m. lamarckii is considered an offshoot of
adansonii.
[7]. Some morphometric characteristics of Egyptian
A. m. lamarckii,
African Apis mellifera scutellata, and
Apis mellifera jemenitica were reported where these subspecies were very close to
A. m. lamarckii, as mentioned in
Table 1, using different techniques such as an electron microscope
[7,11,35,36,37,38,39][7][11][26][27][28][29][30]. Otherwise, the average length of the honeybee forewing in difference races was reported. The highest average was 10.700 mm in
A. m. florea, while the lowest average was 8.275 mm in
A. m. lamarckii. The average head length on different races in adult gave the highest average of 5.575 mm in
A. m. lamarckii, while the lowest average was 3.750 mm in
A. mellifera ligustica [38][29]. The mean body mass of the European (
Apis mellifera Carnica) bee amounted to 120 mg, while the Egyptian bee to 78 mg. This shows that the Egyptian bee is much smaller than the European one, with only 65% of its mass. Similar results related to the thorax masses of both subspecies differ significantly (33 mg vs. 24 mg) for the European and Egyptian bee, respectively. The Egyptian bee is characterized with shorter wing size (45 mm) compared to the European bee (55 mm). The Egyptian honeybee
A. m. lamarckii is significantly smaller, slimmer, and has shorter wings and legs. Moreover, the wing load was 17 and 21 Nm
−2 for the Egyptian and European bee, respectively
[11].
Table 1. Morphological characters of Apis mellifera lamarckii compared to African Apis mellifera scutellata and Apis mellifera jemenitica.