A history of beekeeping

Before beekeeping: honey hunting

The oldest evidence of the human relationship with honey is rock art. Sites across Spain, India, southern Africa and Australia depict figures climbing to wild nests, and the Cueva de la Araña painting in Valencia — a figure on ropes reaching into a cliff nest surrounded by bees — is among the most reproduced images in the subject.

Honey hunting is not beekeeping. It takes from wild colonies and generally destroys them. It also persists: Himalayan cliff honey is still harvested by rope from Apis laboriosa nests, in a practice with an unbroken line back to the images on the rock.

The first beekeeping

1. 1Egypt, from around 2400 BCEThe Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab show bees being smoked, honey extracted and vessels sealed — the oldest unambiguous depiction of managed beekeeping. Hives were horizontal clay cylinders stacked in rows, worked from the rear, and were moved by boat along the Nile.
2. 2The classical MediterraneanGreek and Roman writers describe hive design, swarm management and honey harvest in detail. Aristotle observed colonies closely; Virgil devoted a book of the Georgics to bees, mixing sound observation with the belief that colonies could be generated from a dead ox.
3. 3Northern EuropeSkeps of coiled straw or wicker, and tree beekeeping — colonies kept in hollows cut into living trees. Wax was frequently the more valuable product, because the church needed candles.
4. 4The Americas and the tropicsMeliponiculture — stingless beekeeping — developed independently, with Melipona beecheii held sacred in Maya religion and its keeping governed by ritual.

The problem with every early hive

Skeps, log hives and clay cylinders share one difficulty: the bees attach comb directly to the walls, so it cannot be removed without cutting. Harvesting meant destroying the comb and usually the colony, either by sulphur-burning or by driving the bees out.

The Egyptian horizontal cylinder was the partial exception. Smoking the bees to one end let a beekeeper cut comb from the other without touching the brood nest, which is non-destructive harvest achieved three thousand years before Europe managed it.

The movable frame

In 1851 Lorenzo Langstroth established that bees leave a gap of roughly 6 to 9 millimetres unbuilt — the bee space. Any gap smaller they fill with propolis; any larger they fill with comb. A frame suspended with that clearance on all sides stays free, and can be lifted out, inspected and returned.

Everything modern follows from this. Inspection without destruction, disease monitoring, queen management, artificial swarming, and extraction that returns the comb to the bees rather than melting it. The centrifugal extractor followed in 1865 and the wax foundation sheet around the same time.

The modern era, and its problems

• Global movement of bees, which spread varroa from Asia to the rest of the world in the twentieth century.
• Migratory pollination at industrial scale, of which Californian almonds — around two million colonies for three weeks — is the extreme case.
• Selective breeding, from Brother Adam's Buckfast bee onwards.
• The Africanized bee, an escape from a 1956 Brazilian breeding programme that spread through the Americas.
• Renewed interest in local subspecies conservation, in reaction to a century of importing queens.

The through-line is the same as it ever was. Every innovation solved a problem and created another, and the current one — a globally connected population of managed colonies sharing pathogens — is a direct consequence of how successful the movable frame was.