What are the oldest known beehives?
Short answerMostly true
The oldest hives that physically survive are the stacked clay cylinders excavated at Tel Rehov in the Jordan valley, dated to the Iron Age. Earlier hives are depicted in Egyptian reliefs from the third millennium BCE but do not survive, and hives made of wood, bark, basketry or gourds leave no archaeological trace at all.
Why the answer is clay
Survival is a property of materials and climate rather than of antiquity. Fired and unfired clay survives in dry conditions. Log hives, bark cylinders, coiled baskets, gourds and hollowed sections of trunk have been used far more widely across human history and leave nothing behind. The ancient hive record is a record of one material.
What the Egyptian evidence adds
A Fifth Dynasty temple relief shows horizontal hives stacked in rows, being tended, decanted and sealed. That predates Tel Rehov by well over a thousand years and shows a fully developed practice, which in turn implies an older one behind it. It is a depiction rather than a surviving object, which is why the two answers differ.
Sources
- It is the land of honey: beekeeping at Tel Rehov — Near Eastern Archaeology (2007) · Peer-reviewed article
- The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt — Oxford University Press (2015) · Monograph
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.