How can Dwarves produce honey underground?

Question

I have often heard/read/watched in fantasy about dwarves drinking mead and lots of it. I recently learned that mead is made from honey which requires bees and flowers which require sunlight. I doubt that they could import enough to satisfy the thirst of an entire city (or nation) and even if they could it would be financially irresponsible. So I was wondering if they could produce honey underground.

The obvious solution is that they just make the honey above-ground but lets say that going above-ground is socially unacceptable (like in Dragon Age). Lets further split it into a few separate scenarios:

1. The dwarves have magic light orbs which are basically the same as sunlight. So could bees function completely underground with light and flowers.
2. No magic. So could bees function underground with some torches and maybe skylights (Not sure that could work. Maybe leave a door open and hope the bees come back?).
3. No light (e.g. Dwarf Fortress). Could bees work underground in total darkness (Same as above but dwarves have super-night-vision and have no need of light).

Answer 1

The dwarves can keep the bees in the caverns, but provide them with suitable exits.

You have your beekeepers on the upper levels of the cities. You'll need ventilation somehow to allow for your city to breathe, so these vents can be plenty useful for the bees to exit and re-enter. The beekeepers don't need to ever leave the caverns (Except, perhaps, to get the bees in the first place), but the bees can go out and back in with ease.

Bees usually forage for two to three miles, but they can also forage significantly further away. Presuming that while the Dwarves typically don't go outside, they also don't care for someone living on their doorstep, this means that there are plenty of wild plants for bees to use for their honey needs.

Answer 2

Use honeydew, either as intermediary or final product

Aphids feed on plant matter. When they are eating plant sap, they excrete honeydew, a sugary liquid. You could reasonably make an alcoholic beverage from honeydew, although milking aphids sounds like a chore.

However, certain bees will do it for you. They can take this honeydew and use it to make honeydew honey. In fact, Greek pine honey, which I've had before, comes via aphids. I just learned that I ate aphid poop about 30 seconds ago.

Finally, if you don't to have sap-filled plants that aphids can eat, ergot fungus can also make honeydew. So you can have blind bees feeding on fungus making delicious honey.

Answer 3

Honey Mines

from The Lost Honey Mines of Texas

These caves are filled with millenia worth of the bee's endeavors, as far back and as far down as you dare to explore. Dwarven honey miners brave the dangers to bring back ancient honey, as concentrated as amber. It is from this that they brew their fabled mead.

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I am very pleased that this question was asked because otherwise I would never have discovered the stories of the honey mines. I encourage anyone the least bit interested to follow the link and read the tall tales about the Lost Honey Mines which I greatly enjoyed. Below are 2 excerpts (each about a different mine):

…Carrying the famous smoke gun and a lantern, he was able to explore the cave to a depth of some thousands of feet. He returned with a report of the enormous amounts of honey and wax almost at their finger tips. The exploring company went to San Marcos and obtained sledge hammers and rock chisels and returned to enlarge the opening. But as soon as they commenced to pound on the rock, snakes began to issue from every little hole in the face of the bluff; and while no-one was hurt, the sight was so terrible that the men fled and no amount of hidden treasure could induce them to return…

...During the spring season, when all of the chaparral flowers are in bloom, to one standing on the top of the bluff the bees going and coming from the mouth of the cave resemble a great stream of smoke, and the hum of their wings is so loud that the roar can be heard for miles. According to the story, thirty years ago a surveyor who was hunting some old Spanish bench mark in the vicinity of the cave discovered a second entrance and, making a torch out of his coat, went into the cave protected by the smoke from the burning coat. He passed through room after room filled with long white sheets of the purest guajillo hone and estimated that the cave contained several million pounds of it…

Snake storms! Wearable coat torches! And this does not include the cave with the ghosts. If ever there were a fantasy-ready concept this is it.

Answer 4

4. I would like to suggest a fourth possibility in addition to the three in the original question, that the Dwarves are advanced technologically enough to have artificial lighting. Some people may think that Dwarves with artificial lighting are inconsistent with a fantasy setting.

   Remember these lines from "The Song of Durin", The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 4, "A Journey in the Dark":

   A king he was on carven throne
   In many-pillared halls of stone
   With golden roof and silver floor
   And runes of power upon the door.
   The light of sun and star and moon
   In shining lamps of crystal hewn
   Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
   There shone for ever fair and bright.

   Some may imagine that those lamps were magical, others that they were technological. Thus it is possible that Dwarves had technological artificial lighting to grow plants under the mountains in the greatest fantasy of all.

   In my answer to the question Giving Tolkien Architecture a Reality Check: Dwarvish Kingdoms, I discussed how much underground room the Dwarves would need to grow their own food.

5. A fifth possibility is that the Dwarves are able to synthesize honey from basic ingredients using magic and/or chemical science.

6. According to Tolkien, Dwarves often traded their goods to others for most of their food and didn't produce much of their food. Thus they must have had a lot of trade with other species and realms and importing honey and/or mead would not add a lot to their trade. Mike Scott's comment is quite on the mark.

7. Andon is right about letting bees forage outside. "leave a door open and hope the bees come back" is not a big leap of faith. If the hives are in the dwarf city the worker bees will come back.

8. And maybe fantasy writers just like to write about Dwarves drinking mead without knowing the ingredients of mead or thinking about how the Dwarves obtain mead.

Answer 5

I say: none of the above. Dwarves obtain mead via trade. This is not unrealistic! Dwarves are domain experts on resource extraction via mining; they can obtain whatever other goods they require by trading surplus gold, silver and gems for anything.

Remember, the fundamental purpose of trading is a trade only happens when both sides think they are better off making the trade. Dwarves have gems that they can't eat, elves have excess wine and a surpassing desire for gems but don't want to get their hands dirty; establishing a marketplace for exchanging gems for wine leaves both sides better off.

Even better: now you have a natural story mechanism for generating conflict. What happens when the elves hold out for better gems? Or the gem supply dries up?

Now examine the current situation in Venezuela, a country that foolishly predicated its entire economy on the ability to get in trade the goods it needs to survive in exchange for oil, a resource extracted from the earth. A fantasy story that is an analogue to the current crisis in Venezuela might be quite interesting.

Answer 6

Bees aren't the only creatures that make honey. In Latin America, we have Honey Ants, which also produce a quite edible form of honey. They don't need flowers to do it, either (it's often extracted from prey, but can basically be from any form of ant food). Specialized workers store the honey in their bodies and provide it as nourishment to other ants later on.

They're also present in other parts of North and South America, Australia, and probably a bunch of other places that I just haven't heard about yet. There are also a few species of wasps which produce honey, such as Brachygastra lecheguana (a darker form of paper wasp) and Brachygastra mellifica (the Mexican honey wasp); and while I wouldn't be the first to try and collect that honey, it should be noted that many forms of wasp do build their nests underground.

Speaking scientifically and a bit broader, honey can be defined as a substance produced by any number of creatures, though most famously bees, by distilling down their food source into a sugary syrup for the sake of consumption some distance into the future. Anything that fits that definition could also be made into mead, provided a source of yeast. (As a side note, real honey often does have a small amount of wild yeast in it, even though it's a powerful antibiotic otherwise; so it doesn't sound like an enormous challenge to get yeast.)

So, if your Dwarves lived in an isolated underground society with no realistic surface access, but managed to cultivate some form of subterranean insect that distilled its food into honey (much like beekeeping bees), then mead would be relatively easy to produce. All you would need is a stable underground biome, some industriousness, and some time.

Answer 7

Previous answers have gone the route of placing your bees home or entire habitat underground. This is a perfectly good option, but I thought I'd take it in another direction.

What is Mead?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, mead is a fermented beverage made of water and honey, malt, and yeast. At its core, mead must contain honey to be called mead. If you are willing to let it slide, it is possible to make a beverage that is mead in all but name without honey.

Mead Alternatives

According to this post on the Homebrewing (alcohol, not tabletop) StackExchange, it is possible to make mead with Agave Nectar. Furthermore, according to this thread on a homebrewing forum, it is possible to make a very mead-like product with maple syrup. With this in mind, I would say that it is reasonable to presume you could make a mead-analog with whatever honey-analog you wish!

You could have tap maple tree roots and collect syrup underground. You could have some sort of termite or other underground insect collect nectar much like bees. If you are willing to deviate from a strictly honey-based mead, then your options become much wider. Wouldn't it be fitting for dwarves to make their mead from some sort of burrowing insect?

Answer 8

Can the bees go above ground? Lots varieties of bees build their hives rock openings and holes in the ground, it should be pretty easy to create hives with entrances via holes in a rock face or some similar thing. The beekeeper would never need to go above ground, just open the back of the hive to extract the honey, and the rest of the process would work underground.

With magical sunlight orbs, dwarves could farm any crop, including flowering crops, deep underground and keep bees too.

Other plausible possibilities would include some sort of fungus that excretes nectar and a pollen-like protein source like flowers. And heck, dwarven bees could also have infravision too.

A broader question would be how to feed a city of thousands completely underground. If you have grain you can make bread and beer, but grain requires sunlight. And any animal eats vegetable matter or some other animal that eats vegetable matter, with about a 1:10 retention of calories, so to grow 10 lbs of dwarven beef you'd need to feed it 100 lbs of hay (or mushrooms or whatever). Fungus also relies on vegetable matter to grow, so you'd need excess tree roots or humus to grow fungus for a food supply. If you can solve the problem of how to get enough vegetable matter below ground to support the food matrix, then throwing bees in the mix should be easy.

Answer 9

There are chemoautotrophic organisms. These use chemical energy to drive their metabolism, rather than sunlight. In the real-world, these live in deep-sea vents, and oxidise fresh materials from lava vents. With a bit of a stretch of the imagination, they could oxidise the iron-containing walls of a cavern (possibly the roof, to help push the waste rust away).

Again, back in the real world, these are normally simple organisms. However, they could be plants. To attract the insects, they could use scent (long range), and bioluminescence to guide the insect to the nectary. The insects would then gather the nectar, and make honey in the usual way.

For some ideas, search for chemo(auto)troph, litho(auto)troph [rock-eating organism], and black-smoker [sub-sea lava outlets].

Answer 10

Honey doesn't spoil. It has a high sugar concentration which acts like a preservative. Pots have been found in Egyptian tombs containing honey which are over 3,000 years old and it's still edible.

This means the Dwarves of yore could order loads of honey or mead and have it shipped to their cities and never have to worry about the honey spoiling or if the mead was over 16% alcohol by content, it would be preserved as well. Yeast can similarly be stored as a live culture or a powder. All of this is very well established and understood.

Mead can be as simple or complicated as you wish to make it. No sunlight is needed. All you really need is water, honey, yeast and a sanitary container. A simple airlock will help it vent. Keeping it around 60°F produces the best results. It could be made with the funeral powders of the deceased, it could be made with crushed gems for vitality. It could be made with wine as well.

• http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/history/honey-in-the-pyramids.aspx
• https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/mead/making-mead/

Good luck with your mead.

Answer 11

You can feed bees with sugar water. It's often used by beekepers as a cheap supplemental food source to get a hive started. This will produce a less flavorful honey, but bees will store it in a comb. Bees are opportunistic and will feed on whatever sources of sugar they can find. There have even been cases of them producing blue honey because they were stealing syrup from a M&Ms factory.

Answer 12

Domesticated Honey-Badgers. Dwarven Honey-Badgers.

Or maybe Dwarven Underground Domesticated Honey-Bees...

But I like the Honey Badgers better, just on principle.