What is the origin of the Honeybee?
Origins, co-evolution, and ancestors
Hello and welcome to the first paid subscriber essay in 2025. As you almost certainly know by now, Honeybee Histories is dedicated to understanding the varied history of honeybees and beekeeping across time and in as many different regions of the world as possible. Over the last three years I’ve written essays about ancient Egypt, classical writers, medieval and early modern books, inventions of new hives, honey adulteration, and much more besides. What I realise that I’ve never done though, is offer a comprehensive history of honeybees from their earliest evolution to their modern use as pollinators, beyond the 100th essay that I sent out late last year.
In this fourth year, I plan to do that in a series of essays, exclusively for paid subscribers. What I’m hoping to do here though is a bit different to what I’ve generally been doing until now. With three years of research behind me, I feel that it’s time to start to write a book. I have a lot of ideas about that (and I will begin to share details soon), but key to it is to have a clear understanding of the history of honeybees from their earliest times to the modern day. These essays, then, are intended to form the backbone for that book.
I’m inviting you along for that journey and hoping that you might wish to contribute some ideas or thoughts of your own, or perhaps offer some comments or queries on what I write. I’m very keen to hear back from you, to see where my ideas could be further improved or if there is an area of research that you think deserves more coverage.
These essays then, will cover the history of honeybees from their initial evolution to their modern day uses. Along the way, I plan to explore the earliest human interactions with honeybees, the ideas of classical writers, the expansion of our knowledge about honeybees, and inventions that made beekeeping more practical and expansive.
In this essay we shall begin with how honeybees evolved out of prehistoric wasps during and soon after (relatively speaking) the age of the dinosaurs.
