A Taste For Honey

By Volodymyr Kish

Since the earliest days of our pre-historic ancestors, honey has been one of Mankind’s favourite delights and luxuries.  One of the earliest cave paintings ever discovered, dating from approximately 13000 BC, shows two women collecting wild honey.  

In a time when life was short, brutal and almost totally focused on survival, discovering a bee hive was like winning a lottery, and a cause for great celebration.  Aside from being a decadently sweet and rich treat, honey, with its anti-microbial and antiseptic properties, also had practical uses as a medicine, effective in the treatment of skin wounds and burns, as well as colds, throat infections and gastric ailments.  Numerous ancient civilizations so treasured this wonderful food that they even incorporated it into their religious rites and ceremonies.  It was considered a sacred food by as diverse a set of peoples as the Hindus, the Jews and the Mayans, amongst others.  Egyptians were even known to use honey in the process of embalming their dead.

In Ukraine, beekeeping has a long and established history.  The earliest records from the era of Kyivan Rus portray an established regulated industry that produced one of the major export commodities of that time. Yaroslav the Wise’s famous code of laws titled “Rus’ka Pravda” has no less than seven chapters dedicated to beekeeping and the trade in honey and other apiarian products.

Today, Ukraine is one of the largest producers of honey in the world.  Its annual production of some 75,000 tons of honey makes it Europe’s largest producer and ranks it fifth globally, behind China, Argentina, Turkey and the U.S.  Currently, Ukraine boasts some four hundred thousand beekeepers and close to 5 million hives.  

But quantity is not the only aspect of honey-production that Ukraine can boast about.  At the 2009 global expo of beekeeping known as Apimondia, Ukraine won more gold medals that any other country and the designation as the “Best Honey in the World”. In 2013, Ukraine will be playing host to Apimondia in Kyiv.

Ukraine has a large and significant infrastructure supporting the beekeeping industry.  In 2005, then President Viktor Yushchenko (himself an avid beekeeper) helped initiate the formation of a trade association by the name of the All-Ukrainian NGO Brotherhood of Ukrainian Beekeepers.  There are numerous institutes and research centres dedicated to the further development of beekeeping and the products that flow from it.  The most prominent of these is the P. I. Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping National Research Centre in Kyiv.  It is named after one of the most prolific experts in the field, P.I. Prokopovych, who in the early 1800s developed the removable frame beehive which revolutionized the production of honey throughout the world.

Many famous Ukrainians aside from former President Yushchenko have dabbled with beekeeping as a hobby, including Hetmans Ivan Sirko and Bohdan Khmelnitskiy.  

A little closer to home, the Chairman of the Board of our Ukrainian Credit Union, Eugene Roman, is not only an avid beekeeper, but also has become a leading researcher on how to deal with the recent dramatic and puzzling decreases in bee populations throughout the world.  For reasons still not well understood, bee populations in Europe and North America have declined by as much as 50% in some areas over the past five years.

It is thought that one of the leading potential causes of this decline is infestation by a tiny parasitic mite no bigger than a pinhead called the Varroa Destructor Mite.  Eugene has found a promising approach to combating the mite in an unexpected yet very traditionally Ukrainian folk treatment for more human ailments, namely garlic.  In the springtime, he spreads garlic in his hives and has found it singularly effective in controlling these destructive pests.  Fortunately, there is not the slightest hint of the garlic’s distinctive pungency in the taste of the superb honey produced by his bees.

Aside from producing high quality honey and beeswax products, Eugene has combined his life-long passion for beekeeping with his other love, namely for winemaking.  His Niagara winery “Rosewood Estates” produces some of the most distinctive and marvellous mead or honey wine in the world.  

In whatever form you choose to consume it, honey is not only decadently delicious but, dare I say it, good for what ails you.