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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Honey, Homo Sapiens Balangodensis & The Honey Tree I A Journey Into Sri Lanka’s Real DNA
How the obvious is almost never true – at least on the surface in Sri Lanka
Just across the sea from Sri Lanka, a charismatic catwalk-beautiful Bengali yogi, Sri Aurobindo, advised, “Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living”.
The comment ranked only as Number 299 in his later collected and published Thoughts and Aphorisms, posthumously published in 1958, but still, it remained the only bright spot in an otherwise terrible year, for Sri Lanka at least.
For many island commentators, 1958 came to be seen as the point of no return for the civil war to come. Triggered by Solomon Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only Act of 1956, the anti-Tamil riots and programs that broke out claimed the lives of hundreds – some say over a thousand people.
For 4 days, the Colombo government did nothing, only declaring a state of emergency when the Governor General insisted. By then, it was too late. The riots destroyed what trust existed between the Tamil and Sinhala communities, radicalised both and gave a small boy, Prabhakaran, later known for his profound ruthlessness, the ambition to lead an armed struggle.
As bees turn nectar into honey, so too, in Aurobindo’s logic, does any seeker extract the spiritual truth from experience, however horrible that experience is. Decades later, Sri Lanka is still trying to extract truth from that experience, and the 25-year-long war flowed from it.
And it is a curious and vexing parallel that, as hard as that is proved to be, extracting honey itself is little easier in the country, despite its ancient honey-gathering traditions. But, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out: “None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell”
One of the very oldest songs ever to be remembered on this island – perhaps the very oldest - goes – “The bees from yonder hills of Palle Talawa and Kade suck nectar from the flowers and made the honeycomb. So why should you give them undue pain when there is no honey by cutting the honeycomb.”
Known as The Honey Cutter's Song, Sri Lanka's first and only still-living indigenous people, the Vedda, sang it.
The Vedda inhabited the island long before the first settlers arrived from India around 543 BCE, though the Mahavamsa, the great Buddhist chronicle of Sri Lanka, has neatly spin-doctored them by claiming, erroneously, as it turns out, that they were the descendants of King Vijaya, the island’s founding patriarch whom Lord Buddha protected and his wife, Kuveni, a native demon princess.
The Vedda lived as hunter-gatherers and in caves; their daily tools were bows, arrows, and axes. Their diet depended on what they found in the jungle: sambar and barking deer, wild boar, tortoise, monitor lizard, monkeys, wild fruits, nuts, mushrooms, edible leaves, fish, and, of course, honey.
Wild honey was perhaps their most critical calorie source, so important that they used it as money, an exchange commodity they collected by harvesting wild beehives high on cliffs and trees and using smoke to drive the bees out.
With a mindset that has much to teach us, ravenous and careless consumers that we are today, the Vedda were governed by strict ancestral laws, and killed only for sustenance. So when they collected honey, they sang a song expressing respect for nature and apologised to the bees for taking their hive, asking the bee spirits for safety. Imagine doing that every time you complete your supermarket shop, or pluck flowers to arrange, dying in vases around your home?
How times have changed. Honey of a sort is now easily available in Sri Lanka’s supermarkets, though most of what is sold is little better than coloured processed sugar. But even these bottles took time to reach the shelves of more accessible supermarkets. For years, anyone who wanted honey would have to go to a pharmacy to buy it. They were sold in tiny bottles at prices that made you wish you were a princess.
That honey should find its most cherished home among medics and pharmacists in Sri Lanka is no surprise. It it is prized not just for its curative and standalone benefits, but also for its ability to penetrate the body deeply and amplify the properties of the other herbs and drugs mixed with it. Not unlike a benign nuclear warhead.
As a stand-alone, people often mix it with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon to treat respiratory problems and boost natural immunity. They mix it into tonics to balance digestion and soothe upset tummies. Most famously, it heals wounds and repairs skin.
Sri Lanka’s 140 bee species represent just 0.2% of the world’s bee species, and though you might think 149 is enough to get on with when it comes to honey making, only 4 species actually contribute to honey production and almost all of them are tiny
Only one, the Giant Honey Bee, or Rock Bee, is massive, 20 mm plus, and double the size of the European honey bee. From this you might easily conclude it is a prodigious honey maker. And it is – to a point. It builds its nests in vast single combs high on trees and cliffs but, Prometheus-like, has resisted any attempt to commercialise its production.
The other 3 island bees are all smaller – some much, much smaller than their European counterparts. The Dwarf Honeybee specialises in tiny, inaccessible honeycombs. The Stingless Dammar Bee is the gold standard, its honey prized by medics above sapphires but produced in minuscule quantities. Only the Asian Hive Bee has shown much willingness to co-operate with beekeepers and produce meaningful amounts of honey.
Small wonder, then, that with so few bees, all largely size-challenged, and most reluctant to produce honey, honey was for so long found only in island pharmacies, not on supermarket shelves.
Honey purists today must look hard for the real thing, for the industry remains more cottage than industrial, with just a handful of small, ecologically minded producers driving it, most notably Goodfolks, the brainchild of
Dinesh Gratian Perera, who once chided me for ordering too much honey. “My bees are small, “ he objected, “It’s a lot of work for them to make one bottle, so don’t be greedy.”
Dinesh’s honey, like that of most true producers, has a complex flavour profile, and you'd expect no less from a Sri Lankan bee. Sri Lanka may be small compared to other countries, but it is thankfully no less complex than the billions of neurons that fired up Einstein’s or the polymath Leonardo da Vinci’s brain to produce thought, memory, and consciousness.
Both honey and Sri Lanka do an awful lot in the smallest of spaces. Compared with other honeys, Sri Lankan honey has more chemical polyphenols and compounds that help mitigate chronic disease. Its moisture content is also lower, which helps preserve the honey from fermenting – and gives it a more concentrated taste, though region by region there are notable differences.
Dry Zone honey from the island's north is darker and thicker than other world honeys, and it's best for cooking and eating. Highlands honey has an amber hue; this nectar often comes from avocado trees and is the go-to honey for respiratory medicines. From the southern Sabaragamuwa region, the honey is more golden and is typically sourced from rubber tree nectar.
Having tried, and spectacularly failed, to get our own hives going at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, we now gratefully rely on Goodfolks for our honey. They also produce a delicious Coconut Palm Treacle, but not, yet anyway, the deeper, darker, smokier kittul treacle, which makes wallflower out of maple syrup.
But in all this honey talk, the great personal irony is that the madu madu tree, literally, the honey honey tree in Sinhala, (albeit with an “H”) is about as much use for bee nests, bee nectar and general bee happiness as a chocolate fireguard. They aren't tall enough, lack any useful structure, have no useful cavities, and produce cones rather than nectar-bearing flowers. Though there are teasing and tantalising hints of its pollen and fermented starch being used for aphrodisiacs and to make intoxicating beverages.
And I say “personal” irony, as I have almost 70 of these madu madu trees on the estate here. Before I dipped my ambitions into honey, I imagined this ancient orchard of cyclads would be of inestimable help to my nascent bee hives.
But as is the way in Sri Lanka – never expect the obvious. "There is nothing more deceptive,” noted Arthur Conan Doyle “than an obvious fact." In this regard, I should have paid more attention to Sri Aurobindo too – in particular to Number 3 in his Thoughts and Aphorisms - "it is always the unexpected that happens".
Even so, what the honey honey tree has in its favour is history. The tree is the oldest on this island, predating the honey-gathering Vedda by hundreds of millions of years. The tree has witnessed Sri Lanka's story for 280 million years, since, in fact, the island was no island at all, but part of a single world landmass, Gondwana.
On it grew the Madu MAdu, Cycas zeylanica, to scientists; and to most others, a cycad. Stout as a dowager duchess, with a trunk of bark not unlike dinosaur scales; dark green, coconut-like leaves hard as the best political activist, they grow so slowly as to defy gravity, live for up to two thousand years; and have a very discriminating approach to sex, demanding pollination by just a specific beetle species.
When the first madu appeared, mammals were still 55 million years away. But the madu flourished. In fact, it took to life on Earth so well that, by the Jurassic period, cycads had bequeathed their name to the geological era: the Age of Cycads. Which was also the age of dinosaurs.
My ancient madu trees are not just descendants of one of the earliest plant forms, but also of those whose forebears had to fend off brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and three-horned triceratopses.
It’s great-great-infinitely great grandparents were already here on the island to feel the slow incremental impact of India and Sri Lanka tearing themselves off from Gondwana. They were still here seven thousand years ago, when Sri Lanka floated off from India.
They welcomed the Stone Age migrants that walked over from India, and whose remains archaeologists uncovered when they found Balangoda Man, in the hills south of Horton Plains. His complete 30,000-year-old skeleton bewitchingly lifelike. From him, the Vedda descended, their DNA almost exactly matching his.
The Mara trees oversaw Balangoda Man's shift to a more settled lifestyle, with oats and barley being grown by 17,000 BCE. But as the Stone Age gave way to the Iron Age, new waves of colonisation from India reached the island, mixing with the principal Vedda tribes.
And from the start, the Vedda’s struggle with the new settlers was deeply unequal. Using the progressive technology of the Iron Age, the new colonists could clear land and plant crops, mine metals like copper, and even establish pearl fisheries, each advance securing an ever-greater share of the land’s resources.
Balangoda man and his ancestors were pushed into the country's more inaccessible parts, especially the rainforests, a small part of which, the Sinharaja Forest Reserve, miraculously survives in its original state today.
Today, digested and intermarried into Sinhalese culture, forcibly moved on by repeated government development initiatives and water harvesting projects, barricaded from the forests and caves that nurtured them and driven from hunter-gathering into the narrow world of subsistence rice farming, a few still perform their ancient rites, especially for death, when the body is covered by leaves and honey is offered to ancestors and river deities. “We pray,” noted one survivor, “for their afterlife so that their souls will belong to the deities; they will look after us."
Dpsite all this, the Veda have survived and liekt the Mara trees were there when the great Singhala kingdom of Anuradhapura was raised by the Indian Chola; and later when the Portuguese, Dutch, and British invaded. Mara mra trees were still growing with painful slowness as the first flag on independent Ceylon was raised on February 10, 1948, at Independence Square in Colombo, as Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester and D. S. Senanayake, the father of the nation, stood side by side.
Like the Vedda, they are still here today, and although they are of little use in honey, they share a remarkably important characteristic with it.
“I hold my honey and I store my bread,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, the dazzling American poet,
“In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.”
For honey, like the mara tree, lasts for centuries. However long it might have taken Gwendolyn Brooks to have returned from hell, the honey would still be there, just as dependable as the mara mara. Archaeologists have actually found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that were over 3,000 years old and still safe to eat.
Both marra and honey share that quintessential Sri Lankan characteristic: resilience. It lies at the very heart of its DNA, easily missed by scientists, pundits, tourists, and drivers of fast cars – fast anything, really. Despite all that this island has encountered, nothing has destroyed it. Though some have come close, the country has instead adapted and absorbed the best of what it meets to prepare for whatever comes next.
"Pain is the touch of our Mother,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in Thought and Aphorism No. 93, “teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling: endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy."
In this otherwise imperceptible linkage of Vedda, mara mara tree, and honey, three uniquely Sri Lankan things come together to show, with unexpected grace, an aspect of the island that the casual eye so easily misses – a national hereditary molecule that carries all the necessary genetic instructions for the betterment of life on these shores.
It is a synthesis of metaphor and material that Sri Aurobindo himself would have been proud. When the great man died, presidents and tens of thousands of others came to his ashram in Pondicherry to celebrate his remarkable legacy in uniting so many different philosophies into a single human truth, bewilderingly complex on the surface and utterly simple at its heart.