Anonymous ID: b92fbd April 28, 2023, 4:53 p.m. No.18768719   🗄️.is 🔗kun

If you are wandering around in these very dark forests, and need water, one of the easiest ways to find it is actually to drink the water in these holes in trees. Rivers are few and far between and also tend to attract scary wildlife (lions, leopards, etc). In the dry season, these water reservoirs in the trees dry. Towards the end of the dry season, trees flower.

You may ask why do trees flower when it is dry? Well, the trees know the rain is coming. And when it rains, it really rains. So the trees flower just before the rains so that the bees can pollinate their flowers. The result – bee chaos – bees multiply in August, September, and October. Big hives throw out swarms that look for new nests. Some of these find these convenient empty holes in the top of trees and move in there. They make honey, fill the hole with combs, and then boom. Rainy season and the hive gets drowned.

When a hole full of honey gets drowned, the natural yeast in the honeycomb gets to work and starts turning the honey sugar into alcohol. Within a few weeks, the entire beehive of honey is now a pool of mead in the top of a tree. I have heard accounts of these natural mead reservoirs from friends who fought in the wars in Angola. Their San trackers would be walking through the bush and would suddenly stop, sniff the air, and smile.

The San are great honey hunters and mead makers. The tracker would shimmy the tree, and at the top of the tree was a big reservoir of mead. Everybody got drunk for two days and forgot about the war.