Beehives in Turkey 1996

This is a photo taken during a trip in Turkey in Cappadocia in the autumn or winter of 1996. It was either in Goreme or Kayseri or one of the nearby villages with their specific rock-cut churches, mosques and nowadays hotels. Each family used to dig and enlarge the family house in this troglodyte manner, adding a chamber by digging in the sedimentary wall behind. It looked impressively like a man-made termite mound architecture. I was quite young at the time, returning back from a year in Anchorage, Alaska after i finished my high school there. It was a great trip, joining an art critic friend and his artist pals. We had a great time there. This particular instance has to do with a beehive up high in the village. it was at the entrance of a man-made cave(usual in the region) and it stood somehow outside the village (maybe it was considered dangerous?!). We climbed up, heard the familiar buzz and watched with curiosity this row of longitudinal oldskool beehives sitting in the sun, semi-protected with a rag and straw. They stayed on top of row of broken stones. In the back u can actually see bigger beehives sitting in the shade.

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First, before any posting, I would like say that all the PRISACA blog pictures posted here are the pictures made by the beekeepers themselves. I consider it very important that it is THEIR work, THEIR effort, THEIR commitment to Romanian APICULTURE(the Romanian word for beekeeping) that should stay in the forefront. I am not a bee-keeper, thou coming from an old beekeeping family (they used to have over 100 primitive beehive skeps), i am just a humble data miner, diving into rich beekeeping subculture, sniffing the resources out there on the forums, blogs, personal albums and highlighting them for everybody to admire the gaiety, the resourcefulness, the industrious and hardworking world of these wonderful people! BEEs in general and honey-lovers are an important indicator of human, habitat, ecosystem health in general. For millions of years, this symbiotic relationship between bees and flowering plants was honed again and again. Humans have just very recently come into the picture domesticating or stealing/hunting (the old way) honey from a few species, out of the multitude of wild honey bees. Our human chapter of domesticating bees has a very rich but quite new cultural dimension. Humans have both made life better for the bees, sometimes the competition for the wild species got very harsh. Sometimes new diseases got spread around because of humans. Bees have suffered and endured but we are trying to learn more about them and improve our and their life on earth.
We should continue to study the bee legends, the storytelling potential of the human-bee relationships. If the honey-keepers have such incredible patience and care for their beevolk, we should also at least show the same patience, care and interest for their own work, their cultural artifacts, social structure, family life and practical knowledge.

My job was only to point out, to gather and select out of the rich photographic honeycomb already accessible out there. Herby my conclusions are personal ones, based on remote inferences, queer analogies, exotic deductions and a drop of biological theoretical thinking. I worked trough thousand and thousand of posted pictures and it was an incredible pleasure to do just that and pretty difficult to choose what on subjective grounds - i consider representative for the preservation of this tradition and its lifestyle.
I will make sure to mention the photo's I did, or others did for me, mostly apiculture-related, or BEE design related imagery. I am also talking about decorations and folklore painted on the beehive, trailers or the stands at the local HONEY festivals or international APIMONDIA shows. I also picked out photos with old, archaeological or museum pieces made by the bee-keepers themselves in Romanian and abroad, or wherever i could find and photograph them in the local museums.
Immense thanks to the Romanian bee-keepers that have digitized old photos, books, notebooks and others old and hard to find examples of their particular trade. This are invaluable images and examples from the past!

GAZE AND WONDER AT THE NATURAL BEAUTY of THE HONEYCOMB! I have to thank all these people from Romania and other places, such as the Republic of Moldova, Austria and many others. I also would like to thank all the APICOLA shops in Romania, with all their wonderful devices and specific technologies and designs. I am really glad every major city or small-town has its own, very familiar APICOLA or even family-based, independent honey shops with dozen of miraculous products of apitherapeutic value! Visit any APICOLA shop in your neighborhood and read the books and magazines they continue to publish.
Apitherapeutic products in Romania also have their own designs, advertising and graphic style. They are quite specific and with a fixed and typological iconography with roots in the 70s and 80s. Older woodcut illustrations of beekeeping manuals and cover art are also invaluable additions to the visual support of Beekeeping/Apicultura everywhere.
English is not my first language but bare with me and lets spread the sweet fruits of Romanian "apicultura" around. The final aim is also to make sure the cultural and social layer of beekeeping is taken into account. Beehives and bee societies (as part of the larger group of social insects) have been actively put to political and economic use as metaphors, state models, and ruling example for the working ethos for human societies at large.

At the other end bees can be said to be clear examples of overwork, over-exploitation and complete dependence on human medication and anti-parasitic health care programs. The best of our bees tend to succumb to diseases linked with weak immunity systems. Before pesticide or genetically modified crops hit us they are first to hit the BEEs! CCD is also at least partly due to the incredible strain bees are transported from one side of the US to the other. Again this seems like the huge working force that is being transported in the worst conditions from the Third World to do low paid jobs in the First World. The cleaners and day-caring working classes of the world are the BEEs of today supporting an aging Western society hoarding its riches and privileges.
It is an incredible sensitive issue but we should also see the BEE metaphor as extending always to human matters. Humans have been raised, domesticated and transformed into Eusocial beings. We can hardly reproduce and survive outside the our city beehives, dependent on the protection and technology we have made for ourselves, We are prone to epidemics and other quickly spreading diseases. We are also over-exploiting and basically killing other humans, over-working them to death. Millions of people toil in incredible conditions, hours after hours making all the stuff we touch or use in our daily life. It is the buzz and the hum of all these human millions that work unseen that reminds us of the continuous activity of the bees, barely noticed by our senses. But their work as the work of other humans is vital, we are completely dependent on it and the by-products of their effort.

The opinions expressed on this blog are my opinions and my opinions alone.
Anybody how would like to make me remove any photo of his out of the archive, i will do it if he writes me a note, comment or better an email here at prisaca . fagure @gmail.com