Appreciation post: that random Wikipedia rabbit hole on medieval beekeeping

I stumbled on a stat that says medieval monasteries kept up to 300 hives and I always thought it was like a dozen at most, has anyone else found numbers that totally flipped what they assumed about a historical detail?

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the_barbara1d ago

Did you ever stop to think about how much wax and honey those monks must have been dealing with? I found similar numbers when I was looking into medieval parchment making, and it just floored me. What worked for me was checking out a few university press books on daily medieval life through my library's digital collection. They had actual records from places like the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, which confirmed those big numbers. Sometimes the old textbooks just don't capture how big things really were back then.