I ended up here after reading a mention of Bee Wine in "Cooking in a Bedsitter" by Katharine Whitehorn, published in 1961 in the UK. In the Epilogue, she describes a (what we'd call today) foody friend's bedsit/kitchen: "On one end of this mantlepiece, which was broad, a large jar of bee wine was in full activity, the bees with awful deliberation floating very slowly up and down."