My only suggestion is that you should also mention that “honey” is mentioned in connection with the Lehite account, implying that bees were present at Nephi’s “Bountiful.” In fact wild bees can be found today in the cliffs along the coast of southern Oman, whereas they are usually not elsewhere in Arabia, presumably due to lack of vegetation. And they are never mentioned in connection with the New World, only the Old. This latter fact is interesting in view of the general fertility of Mesoamerica; it might reflect the heightened awareness of the bee in the Old World due to its rarity.

As for bees actually making it into the New World with the Jaredites, good eye on noting that that wasn’t actually documented. Now that I think about it, bees surviving a year’s ship voyage does seem a little unlikely for a few reasons.

The Europeans brought honeybees over to the New World on ships just fine, but that was a journey of 11-12 weeks at the longest. Bees are well-equipped to handle long periods with no flowers available- that’s why they make honey. A year is a really long time though! They’re geared towards stocking up enough honey to last over a winter (when they use it up a lot slower than during summer- in winter they cuddle up in a ball to stay warm, which saves energy). A year at room temperature, they’d have to go through several barrels of honey to make it that long, and they’d need some way of getting food into and poop out of the hive. We had a plexiglass-fronted demo hive that we’d take around to elementary schools to show the classes, and of course all entrances and exits had to be stopped up for this and you could tell they really didn’t like not being able to come and go.

Which brings us to the next issue… spending a year inside a tight-like-unto-a-dish ship filled with bees? You know, I’m not at all surprised if they thought better of it. : )

***

Ronan- for what it’s worth, American Bee Journal and another big beekeeping periodical whose name I can’t remember right now are very good sources for native beekeeping methodologies. It’s a little unusual that something geared towards American hobbyists would do that, but beekeepers are something of an international brotherhood (sort of like being Mormon). This generates enough curiosity that every issue of these magazines has a pretty good and in-depth report on native beekeeping methods somewhere- Asia and the Middle East are featured most frequently since those seem to have the most diversity in domesticated bee species and tending styles. There’s a good one on meliponiculture from 2007 that I can try and find for you if you’re interested, and all kinds of wild stuff on Iranian dwarf bees and giant Apis cerana from Thailand, etc that may or may not be of interest to you. : )

There are nearly innumerable things that I have heard over the years, from members and non-members alike, that “the Book of Mormon teaches” which, upon closer scrutiny, actually aren’t taught or claimed in the book itself. I also assumed years ago that the Jaredites took bees with them to the Americas; if someone else hadn’t asked me to show them exactly where the book says that, I wouldn’t have realized that it doesn’t make that claim explicitly.

It’s been amazing to me that each time I read the book I tend to pick up something new that I haven’t understood previously – and often that is a change in something I used to think it taught but in reality it doesn’t.

Kind of funny, if it’s true…

I have deliberately left the apologetic implications of Near Eastern apiculture (such as they are) unsaid at this stage. One could spill some ink on the beeless Babel/Babylon, and I will at a later date, possibly as an essay on the use of the Documentary Hypothesis in Mormon apologetics.