My mother spins honey all summer long as she and my stepdad have a honey business. She used her own honey when she made mead after I wrote the blog After Dinner Drinks, and I can vouch that many recipes in The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook were as delicious as we had hoped!
Having enjoyed the fruits of her labor from strawberry and honey jam to garlic cloves jarred in honey (excellent relief for heartburn should you be afflicted, and so delicious to cook with), to cinnamon-flavored honey that I add to teas and dip apples in, I wondered about beekeeping during the Regency. What I learned is that beekeeping has been a practice since the Ancient Egyptian era.
In essentials, the art of beekeeping has remained the same. However, changes from a simple straw basket called a skep to an apiary that allows for the collection of honey without damaging the hive have shown that everything allows for some improvement.
By the Regency, honey was a versatile product used in the kitchen as a supplement for sugar and, at times, very expensive as an ingestible medicinal or in healing poultices applied to the skin.
A natural byproduct of making honey is beeswax. In Candles for Late Night Reading, I wrote of beeswax in making candles. And if one was fortunate enough to know a beekeeper or to be one, they could avoid having to use the odiferous tallow candles. Like honey, beeswax is helpful in keeping skin soft or for other healing purposes.
What I love most is that this is one art that is not being lost to time. Check out the wonderful honeycake recipe, but by all appearances, it is perfectly complemented by a cup of tea. It is the sole property of The English Kitchen, so I will direct you there:
17th Century Honey Cake | The English Kitchen
Sources for Beekeeping is all the Buzz!:
Geoponika: Farm Work, translated by Andrew Dalby “Medieval Beekeeping” Where the Middle Ages Begin at Medievalists.net, 2011, Medieval Beekeeping (medievalists.net)
Beekeeper Paul “History of Beekeeping: Timeline & Notable Facts” Honeybee Hobbyist, May 18, 2022 History of Beekeeping: Timeline & Notable Facts | Honeybee Hobbyist
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