Archaeology Magazine - April 1976 - 14

Extension hoops: (a) single fragment from a
farmhouse near Sounion, inner and outer
faces, and (b) the same in sectional
restoration, with profile drawings of hoops
from Vari (c, d) and Trachones (e, f).

fixed with bee-glue and wax to the roof - once
again a plain unroughened roof - and hang
down, not along the length of the pipe but
across the width, one behind the other, in a
series resembling a stack of pancakes set on
their sides.
This arrangement of the combs accords very
well with the idea that the newest combs in the
ancient Attic hives could have been
conveniently taken away from the nursery
section with minimal disturbance by simply
detaching the extension hoop holding the last
one or two of the series; a lengthwise
arrangement of combs would of course
preclude this method. It is worth noting that
terracotta hives are still in use in Malta, in the
form of clay pots laid on their sides with
extensions (rather large ones, over a foot long)
in which the combs intended for collection are
removed at appropriate times. The modern
box-hives with detachable stories permit the
use of a more sophisticated version of the same
technique. Even with the old fashioned
86

dome-shaped straw hive once regularly used in
Britain, a straw or wicker extension hoop was
sometimes added under the hive itself for the
same purpose.
A hint why the extensions were used in
Attica for the collection of honeycombs - and
possibly only at special seasons is given by the
ancient geographer Strabo. He accords great
praise to Attic honey and mentions a
particularly fine kind called "unsmoked" from
the method of collecting it. He specifies that
this kind was produced in the area of the silver
mines, that is to say, in southern Attica
(although by his day the mines had long ceased
production so that the area had probably
reverted to rough farming). The ancients
certainly knew how to use smoke to induce
passivity in bees when they opened hives and
knew also that heavy smoking contaminated
the honey and spoiled its flavor. One might
conclude that the extension hoops were
devised to speed up the process of harvesting,
particularly when the delicate spring-flower
honey was to be gathered, and possibly even to
cut out the use of smoke altogether. A
fragment of a combed hoop of this very kind
and sherds of combed pots found in late 1972
at a farmhouse site in the hills north of
Sounion offered some substantiation to this
conjecture, for the location is just on the edge
of the silver mining area where Strabo said that
"unsmoked" honey was produced. It would not
be in the least surprising if such a technique of
harvesting honey without gross use of smoke
had been favored also by the farmers and
beekeepers of Mt. Hymettus, an area as
famous for its excellent honey in antiquity as it
is today.

jA. 11the parallels, ancient and modern,
provide strong arguments to back the idea that
the combed pots and hoops and lids found at
Trachones and Vari had been used as
beehives. But parallels do not always constitute
conclusive proof. In 1969, however, John
Graham, one of the excavators of the Vari
farmhouse, consulted with his scientific
colleagues at the University of Manchester in
England, and a test was devised which would
provide irrefutable proof for or against the
hypothesis that the combed pots were hives.
This experiment assumed that the ancient
bees would use liberal quantities of wax to
Archaeology Magazine - April 1976

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - April 1976
