The History of Beekeeping

The earliest evidence of humans and bees together isn't a hive at all. Rock art in Spain dating back roughly eight thousand years shows a figure climbing toward a wild nest to take honey, the oldest known record of humans pursuing what bees produce. For most of that history, getting honey meant finding a wild colony and taking the risk of raiding it.

Beekeeping as a deliberate practice, rather than opportunistic raiding, appears in ancient Egypt by around 2400 BCE, where reliefs show cylindrical clay and mud hives stacked along the Nile, tended by workers who moved them to follow the flowering seasons. Greek and Roman beekeepers used woven skeps and clay vessels, and Aristotle wrote observations on bee behavior that held up remarkably well for someone working without a microscope.

For most of beekeeping's history, one problem went unsolved: harvesting honey generally meant destroying the comb, and often the colony. Skep beekeeping, the woven basket-style hive common through the nineteenth century, offered no way to inspect or remove comb without cutting it out, which frequently meant killing the bees to get the harvest.