A History of Honeybees
The 100th Honeybee Histories essay
Hello, and welcome to the 100th essay from Honeybee Histories! This newsletter comes out unusually on a Wednesday as tomorrow’s slot is an essay for paid subscribers only. I wanted to celebrate this little milestone with all of you.
I can’t quite believe that we’ve reached 100 essays. Honeybee Histories is about to complete its third year, and its longevity is all down to your support. I’m so pleased that you have subscribed to this newsletter. According to the stats Substack provides me, many of you read every post (or at least take a look at it), which is just incredible for me. I’m so thankful for your interest and very much hope that this venture continues for another 100 essays and many more thereafter.
To celebrate this milestone, I thought I would do something unusual for Honeybee Histories and offer a summary of each year’s essays over the Christmas break. That means three bonus newsletters coming out over the next three weeks, leading to the first normal essay of 2025 on Thursday 9th.
Before then, I thought I would celebrate 100 essays with a brief overview on the history of honeybees but also with a little celebration offer. Until the end of 2024 (ends 31st December), I’m offering a discount on memberships to Honeybee Histories. Simply click this link to get 15% off a monthly or annual subscription for the next 12 months.
As a reminder paid subscribers get weekly (instead of fortnightly) essays, full access to three years of archives, plus the occasional bonus feature such as the Honeybee Histories e-magazine (published twice a year).
A Brief History of the Honeybee
The story of honeybees begins over 100 million years ago. The earliest fossil evidence we have for any bee species reaches back to the time of the dinosaurs, to the Cretaceous period. These were the early ancestors of our modern honeybees. Similar, but not quite the same.
Bees evolved out of wasps, developing alongside flowering plants. Indeed, the development of honeybees is a story of co-evolution. Flowers evolved so that pollinating insects could spread their genetic material to other plants allowing them to grow, multiply, and thrive. In return, wasps evolved to consume nectar and pollen instead of meat, enabling them to form colonies and develop a much more complex societal system. The bees learned how to transform nectar and pollen into honey, making their colonies into honey factories. This mutualistic relationship between bees and plants has shaped the diversity of life on Earth.
Ancient Civilisation
At some point in the development of early human societies we discovered honey most likely by harvesting it directly from wild hives. Archaeological evidence confirms that humans have been harvesting honey for at least 8,000 years. One of the oldest known depictions of honey gathering is a cave painting from Cuevas de la Araña in Spain (in English, the Spider Caves), dating back to around 6,000 BCE. The Spider Cave contains a scene depicting a human figure hanging off a cliff-face, taking honey from a hive and placing it into a basket.
The ancient Egyptians were the first to document their ability to artificially hive honeybees, using clay cylinders to mimic their natural conditions in tree hollows. In the earliest era of their civilisation the Egyptians adopted the bee as a royal symbol for Lower Egypt. When the sun-god, Ra came to prominence, they constructed solar-temples, such as the one at Abu Ghorab, constructed for Pharoah Newserre Any in the Fifth Dynasty. When excavating the remains of this temple, archaeologists discovered a chamber of seasons, containing a series of reliefs. One of these depicted the process of controlling swarms and gathering and storing honey in large jars. This is our first evidence of beekeeping, rather than honey hunting of wild hives.
The evidence from ancient Egypt reveals that bees were highly revered, and the role of beekeeper was part of a hierarchy which lead to the very top of their society with a Great Sealer of the Honey Jars. Honey was used in religious rituals, as a sweetener, and for medicinal purposes. There is also evidence that they used beeswax as moulds and for candles.
Antiquity
Ancient Greek mythology is rich with references to bees and beekeeping. Their god, Apollo was most associated with bees and the poet Homer once referred to honey as “the gift of the gods” in his epic, the Iliad. Most famously, Aristotle wrote extensively about their behaviours and biology, setting the standard from which almost all knowledge about honeybees was derived until the sixteenth century.
Beekeeping was also well-developed in ancient Rome. The Romans valued honey for its culinary and medicinal properties and used it as a sweetener, preservative, and as an ingredient in various remedies. Roman scholars, such as Pliny the Elder (in his The Natural History), continued to document beekeeping practices following in the wake of Aristotle.
The Medieval era
Although much of the scholarly knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire, that knowledge was retained in Islamic states and would eventually find its way back to Western Europe. In the meantime, beekeeping practices continued, with a wide variety of hives and skeps used, largely dependent on regional traditions. Honey was the primary sweetener as sugar had yet to be discovered.
Most villages and towns had hives, but it was really the Monasteries that spread across Europe where most beekeeping occurred. These became centres of beekeeping knowledge and practice, with monks maintaining apiaries to produce honey and beeswax, the latter being essential for making candles used in religious services. The practical benefits of honeybees led religious figures to associate them with spirituality, ethics, hard work, and community, extending the metaphors and allusions of the classical era to view honeybees as a window into the ideal human society and behaviours.
The Early Modern Period
The invention of the printing press in the 15th century led to a new explosion in ideas and sharing of best practice in beekeeping, starting with Georg Pictorius’ Pantopolion, translated into English by Thomas Hill, and then in other writings, such as Charles Buttler’s The Feminine Monarchie, which was the first publication to suggest that the leader of the hive was female.
The scientific revolution starting in the 17th century brought new understanding and innovations, including Jan Swammerdam studying honeybees under a microscope for the first time and the blind entomologist, François Huber discovering that the Queen Bee mates with drones in the air (a vital and transformational discovery). This era also saw an explosion in new hive designs, including the first glass observation hives.
The early modern period was also the beginning of the end for honey’s dominance as the main sweetener as sugar rapidly spread across the world. Beeswax also became less important due to changes in religious ceremonies following the Reformation, and the dissolution of many monasteries who used to be the champions of beekeeping.
The Industrial Revolution
Various beekeeping associations and journals popped up during the nineteenth century, leading to many small- and large-scale beekeepers sharing new knowledge and inventions and allowing beekeepers to engage in collective bargaining to improve sells and public trust. This was also the era when honey adulteration became rife, leading to new laws and regulations and the need for beekeepers to promote the health benefits of their product more vigorously.
Nonetheless, this was an exciting time to be a beekeeper as the biology and behaviour of bees became increasingly clear, leading to new hive inventions. For example, Jan Dzierżon learning how bees reproduce and communicate through the waggle dance, leading to better hive designs. Lorenzo Langstroth perfected the movable frame hive, allowing beekeepers to better inspect and manage their hives more efficiently. In addition, Petro Prokopovych was instrumental in transforming beekeeping practices into a commercial enterprise forging the beginning of the honey industry that we know today.
Honeybees in the Modern Era
The 20th century saw significant advancements in beekeeping technology and knowledge. The development of the centrifugal honey extractor made it easier to harvest honey without destroying the comb, while studies of diseases and pests, led to improved hive management practices and treatments.
The increased spread of honeybees across the world, and the trade in colonies over wider distances also lead to new problems, such as the Varroa mite. The development of pesticides, fungicides, and artificial fertilisers, alongside the removal of many natural habitats to make way for large commercial farms and increased urban spaces, has led to a massive decline in wild colonies and significant losses in human-managed apiaries. Indeed, climate change and ecological destruction continues to make life challenging for bees.
The discovery that honeybees are vital for the pollination of many plants has led to the increased use and value of bees in pollination duties. This has changed the purpose of beekeeping from primarily honey and wax production, to moving colonies en-masse great distances to pollinate specific plants. One example of this is the almond season in California where about 1.6 million colonies are transported to one location.
The wider spread of honeybees has also brought benefits. The health-giving properties of Manuka honey from New Zealand, for example, would not have existed if humans had not transported colonies of bees to those islands.
In summary, honeybees are crucial to global food security due to their pollination duties, and honey continues to be a highly sought after commodity. However, bees, like all insects, are under huge pressures due to human induced changes to climate and ecology.
If you would like to consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Honeybee Histories, remember that there is a 15% discount offer until 31st December 2024. A paid subscription helps me to research and write this Substack, but it also offers you weekly essays, access to the full archive, and the occasional bonus feature.