What was found at Tel Rehov?
Short answerTrue
An apiary: rows of cylindrical clay hives, roughly eighty centimetres long, stacked three high with walkways between them, in the middle of an Iron Age town in the Jordan valley. Around thirty were excavated and the full installation is estimated at a hundred or more, which makes it industrial production rather than a household sideline.
How the hives worked
Each cylinder has a small flight hole at one end and a removable lid at the other, so the beekeeper works from the back while the bees come and go at the front. Thick clay walls buffer the temperature swings that would cook a colony in a thin wooden box in that climate. It is a design fitted to the place, not a primitive version of a modern hive.
The bees, and the claim that rests on them
Bee remains recovered from inside the hives were measured and reported as resembling an Anatolian rather than the local Syrian subspecies. If that identification holds it implies live colonies were moved several hundred kilometres in the Iron Age.
Sources
- It is the land of honey: beekeeping at Tel Rehov — Near Eastern Archaeology (2007) · Peer-reviewed article
- Industrial apiculture in the Jordan valley during Biblical times with Anatolian honeybees — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2010) · Peer-reviewed article
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