This is what people used to think bees were lmao.

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    They were already opening beehives where you can see the bee worms. They could trap the oxen worms and either grow them out or compare the two. Where did that belief come from and why did that group believe something so easily disprovable?

    • ToastGhost [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Some dude say fly larva in a carcass, saw flies around the carcass, and assumed bees are just flies.

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        But then what's your next assumption? This is the only source of sugar apart from fruit, I'd be stung to death if I collected a wild colony, what if I just put these maggots in a box until they become bees and then I'll have lots of honey without going through all the trouble of suiting up and smoking them out.

        • ToastGhost [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The peoole writing this shit arent agricultural workers, theyre basically medieval shitposters. Got a wild speculation? Dont waste your time investigating it, just put it to print!

          • happybadger [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Mendel was a monk for a reason. It's a job that puts you in close contact with nature but in a more comfortable position than a farmer so you have the time to think about things. A lot of monasteries kept bees for extra income and were the scriptoriums producing stuff like this. Of all the agricultural knowledge that seems like it would be accurate in that era, you'd think it would be stuff they're in such close proximity to.

          • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            also, what kind of man keeps boxes with slugs and worms and creepy crawlies in them in some intentional manner that feels, to me an authority figure, ritualistic?

            A WARLOCK in league with THE DEVIL.

            burn him! take all his shit and turn his family out into the streets!

    • sam5673 [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This was back when Europe believed in the Greek scientific system which worked by making an assumption and then taking it as true. The idea of actually testing things was introduced later

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Be me, mr. dumb

        Only literate guy in the village who can afford vellum because I'm extra Christian

        the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between bee worms and cow worms. you imbeciles. you fucking morons"

    • cilantrofellow [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      You’re thinking retrospectively, knowing some level of the scientific method.

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Even if they didn't have the same methodology, they still experimented in informal ways and kept bees as a business. If you told me today that I could make bees with rotten meat and I didn't know better, it would seem like a free money printer because I can put roadkill in a box and harvest honey/royal jelly/beeswax that's still valuable today even without it being a primary sweetner/preservative/light. They were surrounded by dead animals and everything bees produce is super valuable to them both practically and economically. If seeking the path of least resistance got us all of our tools until that point, intuitive experimentation was at least powerful enough to understand things like hydrodynamics and stone construction. Yet for X centuries people either kept putting rotten meat in boxes and being disappointed without thinking about it or they thought this worked but nobody made a workshop that recycled inedible ox parts into bees. You're otherwise facing the risk of climbing a tree to collect a wild hive or setting up the wooden hive and hoping a displaced colony finds it by winter, while your era's equivalent of scientific understanding says you can just put stew scraps in a box and wait until the maggots transform.

        • nohaybanda [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          See, you're forgetting that a large part of the literate and high clergy of the time were just some aristocrat's inbred failsons. They're not sending their best, folks.

        • sam5673 [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It's annoying to test things though and if you don't you can take a long lunch

    • triangle [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      "Animals and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in earth, and air in water, and in all air is vital heat so that in a sense all things are full of soul. Therefore living things form quickly whenever this air and vital heat are enclosed in anything. When they are so enclosed, the corporeal liquids being heated, there arises as it were a frothy bubble." Aristotle.

      Aristotle said some animals just get spontaneously generated so nobody else questioned it until the Rennaisance and Redi proved flies don't just form spontaneously from rotten meat. I can get some people thinking stuff just spontaneously generated, like, trees growing don't actually absorb much soil from seedling to tree (most of the tree is made from CO2) so I guess they figured it just made sense.

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        You'd think for such an important idea, not just conceptually but practically since the beekeepers would need to reproduce colonies, someone would test that centuries before the renaissance. They had sealed boxes and they could otherwise scoop maggots into a fresh hive to make their apiary more productive. Real emperor has no clothes energy.

        • triangle [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The people doing the writing and the people doing the beekeeping probably didn't talk much, lol. You ever read some of the medieval travel guides? Apparently these guys lived in Ethiopia and Asia.

          Although, there were monks and monastaries that made mead from fermented honey so maybe there are some written accounts that have a more empirical first-hand knowledge basis.

          • happybadger [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_Detail_Africa-eyes-on-shoulders.jpg

            feels good man