ABSTRACT
The honeybee seems to have been nearly ubiquitous in pre-modern China. Many local gazetteers record bees and bee products in their lists of produce; sundry essays, notebook entries, and poems further attest to the presence of bees and beekeeping in many parts of China. Nevertheless, bees occupied a less prominent place in Chinese culture than this ubiquity suggests. There are only scattered and mostly brief references to them before the Song dynasty (960–1279 ce), and while the spread of printing from the tenth century did mean more texts on bees were produced and have survived, they remained comparatively few in number throughout the late imperial period. Perhaps crucially, there are almost no clear references to honeybees in the pre-Qin philosophical classics; the specific term mifeng 蜜蜂 “honey-bee”, does not appear in any extant text until the third century ce. Before that, the character feng 蜂, which can refer to wasps and hornets as well as bees, is usually used alone, and feng are portrayed negatively as swarming, stinging insects. Although we know honey was being consumed in what is now northern China by the seventh millennium bce, the word for it, mi 蜜, rarely appears in early texts; archaeological finds and textual references suggest that beeswax may have been the more important bee product. While honey clearly became more important with time, even in the 1630s Song Yingxing 宋應星 (1587–1666) in his Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things, a kind of technical encyclopedia, claimed that four-fifths of sweeteners came from plants, mostly sugar cane, and only a fifth of honey came from kept bees, the rest being hunted from cliffs and caves (Tiangong kaiwu 《天工開物》 62, 66). Nevertheless, by the Song period more sophisticated understandings of honeybees and beekeeping had developed, probably not coincidentally paralleled by richer literary representations of bee colonies, mostly as Confucian royal courts.
