A history of honey

Honey hunting

Before there was beekeeping there was robbery. People found wild colonies and took the comb, usually with smoke and usually at some risk, and they did it for a very long time before anyone thought of keeping bees.

The best-known depiction is on a cliff face at the Cuevas de la Araña near Bicorp in Valencia: a figure on ropes or ladders, reaching into a cavity, surrounded by flying insects, with a container. It is conventionally dated to the Mesolithic, on a bracket several millennia wide rather than the single figure usually quoted, and is among the earliest images of honey collection anywhere. Comparable rock art occurs in southern Africa and India, and honey hunting continues today in Nepal, Malaysia and parts of Africa, in some cases from the enormous open combs of Apis dorsata on cliff faces.

Keeping bees

At some point the practice shifted from finding colonies to housing them. The clearest early evidence is Egyptian: relief carvings from the third millennium BCE show organised apiculture with horizontal cylindrical hives, smoke, and honey being decanted and sealed. Honey appears extensively in Egyptian offering lists, medical papyri and grave goods.

The classical Mediterranean took it further. Greek and Roman writers on agriculture treat beekeeping as a serious specialism, and Aristotle's observations of colony life were sharp enough to remain influential for a very long time — including his mistakes. Thyme honey from Mount Hymettus was already a named prestige product, one of the earliest examples anywhere of honey identified and traded by its floral source rather than simply as honey.

Northern Europe developed its own traditions: skeps of coiled straw, forest beekeeping in hollow trees, and in parts of central and eastern Europe a system of tree beekeeping with legally protected rights over specific trees. Mesoamerica developed something entirely separate — Maya keeping of stingless Melipona bees in log hives, with its own deities and calendar, a tradition of well over a thousand years that survives in Yucatán today.

The sugar displacement

Honey's central place in the diet ended with cane sugar, and it ended fast. Sugar spread through the medieval Islamic world and reached Europe as a luxury; then the plantation economies of the Caribbean and Brazil — built on enslaved labour — made it cheap. Beet sugar in the nineteenth century made it cheaper still and freed it from the tropics entirely.

Within a few generations, the only concentrated sweetener most people had ever known became one option among several, and an expensive one. Honey moved from staple to speciality, and the beekeeping that had supported it contracted correspondingly. Its cultural weight — in language, ritual and metaphor — is a residue of a period when it had no substitute.

The modern hive

One nineteenth-century observation reshaped beekeeping. Lorenzo Langstroth identified bee space: bees leave gaps of roughly 6-9 mm as passageways, and fill anything larger with comb and anything smaller with propolis. Building a hive with frames spaced at that dimension means the frames stay separate and can be lifted out.

Before that, harvesting usually destroyed the comb and frequently the colony. Afterwards, a beekeeper could inspect brood, assess health, manage swarming and extract honey without wrecking anything. The centrifugal extractor and comb foundation followed within a couple of decades, and together they turned beekeeping from a seasonal harvest into a managed year-round practice. Every hive in commercial use descends from that idea.