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The threat of the Asian hornet, and more notably, the environmental impact of pesticides have surely raised public consciousness of the dangers of bee mortality and the deadly consequences of their extinction to the planet.
In connection with bees and beekeeping, let us review a former custom, vanished sometime between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, according to which house bees were to be told of the death of their keeper. We are of course talking about a time when most farmsteads kept honeybees.
Telling the bees. Photograph taken from Gure Herria [Our People]. Euskal Biblioteka. Labayru Fundazioa.
Beekeepers in Carranza (Bizkaia), 2003. Miguel Sabino Díaz.
Folks have kept bees in pretty much all inland locations of our country, be it out of curiosity or by tradition. Joxe Mari Gabaro, native of Markina (Bizkaia) and named after the house where he was born, owned several beehives to harvest honey from them. His fellow citizens would have referred to him as an erle-maisua, a similar compound to ontzi-maisua ‘quartermaster’, formed from erle ‘bee, beehive’ and maisu ‘master’, literally meaning ‘bee-master’. (more…)
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