Ken W

In the Country Bears episode, you were dubious that honey for bears could serve the same purpose as beer for humans. Mead is an alcoholic beverage made of fermented honey. The movie writers may have known this or may have been trying to be clever. Tangentially, “mead” is one word that linguists used to determine the geographic origin of the English language. English is an Indo-European language, a family of over 100 languages ranging from India to the Western Europe, as diverse as Sanskrit and the Romance languages. These languages have many similar words, and “mead” is one of them. These languages seemed to originate in the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, honeybees cannot live in cold climates, so “mead” as a term for honey alcohol must come from a region where honeybees live. The guess is that thousands of years ago proto-Indo-European was spoken just north of the Black Sea and spread north, south, east and west until “mead” became the English word for fermented honey.