Article 848 (19 more) in rec.food.historic:
From: jane@soave.swdc.stratus.com (Jane Beckman)
Subject: Re: Bees (was Re: 'Pioneer sugar'? )
Date: 3 Dec 92 01:48:48 GMT

>>Sorry if this is straying off the topic a bit, but I'm surprised
>>to infer that there is no native north american honey bee.
>>Do I understand this right? This would imply that the native
>>americans had no access to sweets beyond tree sap, but also,
>>that flowering plants relied on wasps, bumble bees and 
>>butterflies for pollination. Quite surprising considering
>>how pervasive the honey bee is now.

If my feed hadn't been down, I would have responded to this
one, earlier, citing "The Hive and the Honeybee" as well as my
college course on beekeeping.  There are NO native North
American honeybees.  Bumble bees produce only small amounts of
honey, and are ground-nesting, which means harvest is
difficult.  There are plenty of native bees in North America,
though, such as sweat bees, cuckoo bees, leaf-cutting bees,
carpenter bees, etc.  None of them store honey for the winter.
Most gather nectar and pollen and feed it to the brood (or
stuff it into a container, either in the ground or inside a
rolled leaf), but do not produce excess for overwintering,
hybernating in the winter, instead.  By the way, honey bees actually
do not feed honey to the brood.  They eat pollen moistened
with honey, which produces a glandular secretion that they
feed to the brood.

As far as pollination goes, not only are most North American
native plants designed to be pollinated by things other than
honeybees (butterflies, solitary bees, flies, hummingbirds,
bats, etc.), but some actually produce honey that is poisonous
to honeybees.  California buckeye is one plant that can kill
off a hive very swiftly, if the bees harvest too much honey
from this tree.  There are other plants with similar problems
for the honeybee.

In terms of honey production, though, there is one source of
honey that has not been cited.  In the desert areas around
Utah, there were honey ants.  Honey ants actually do produce
and store honey; they just store it in the grossly-distended
stomach of other ants ("repletes") who function as honey
resevoirs.  These honeypot ants can get to be the size of
peas.  The Indians would dig up the nests and eat the repletes
like candy.

--
  Jilara   [jane@swdc.stratus.com]

Article 824 (12 more) in rec.food.historic:
From: Justin M. Sanders
ubject: Re: Bees (was Re: 'Pioneer sugar'? )
Date: 30 Nov 1992 21:16:27 GMT

>>Honey bees
>>("the white man's fly" to the Indians) were making their way 
>>up the Platt at a rate of about 20 miles a year, but there was
>>a lot of prairie to cross, and emmigrants had better things to
>>do (like harvesting hay for livestock) than hunting up sugar
>>substitute.
>Sorry if this is straying off the topic a bit, but I'm surprised
>to infer that there is no native north american honey bee.
>Do I understand this right? This would imply that the native
>americans had no access to sweets beyond tree sap, but also,
>that flowering plants relied on wasps, bumble bees and 
>butterflies for pollination. Quite surprising considering
>how pervasive the honey bee is now.

Well, after a bit of research, I can say that North American Indians
had no regular access to honey prior to the introduction of the 
European honeybee.  The European honeybee was introduced into the 
continental U.S. in the 1600's by the English in Virginia.  There are 
native bumblebee species which make honey, but I have found no 
indication that the Indians harvested it.

Here's what Collier's Encyclopedia has to say:
    "Because bumblebees store relatively small quantities of honey,
     hardly anyone robs them.  Stingless bees, on the other hand,
     store large quantities, and woodsmen in the tropics often cut
     trees to get at their nests or dig nests from the ground.  From
     Mexico to Brazil certain species are kept by native peoples as
     domesticated bees."

The stingless bees were confined to the region from Brazil and Columbia
to Southern Mexico (Yucatan).  The Maya used honey from these bees quite
a lot.  A major scholarly work on these bees can be found in H.F. Schwarz,
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol 90 (1948).

