Bees are fluffy little bastards that fly around pollinating things and generating a steady supply of wax, honey and fear. The fear bit makes a lot of sense when you consider that bees evolved from wasps, which are pretty much tiny airborne packets of murder.
The Latin word for beekeeping is apiculture, but the ancient Romans did not invent stealing shit from these industrious little fuckers. Some of our earliest records of humans making off with bees’ hard-earned honey are cave paintings, because writing hadn’t been invented in 13,000 BCE. Let put that another way: people were dangling off cliffs to poke hives full of wild bees before the beginning of the Holocene period, which is to say they were still in an ice age and hadn’t domesticated goats yet.
Why dangle off cliffs when you can just conveniently keep them in adorable little boxes? In 760 BCE, a guy from Mesopotamia by the name of Shamash-resh-usur asked that very question. The Egyptians had already been keeping bees for centuries, so he knew there had to be a way, and Shamash was determined to find it! He tried…and he failed. He failed so hard that the entire city he governed was abandoned and only a few stone carvings show it ever existed or attempted apiculture. There are no other records of anyone in Mesopotamia making any attempt to domesticate honeybees.
Good job, Shamash.
In contrast to the Mesopotamian failure, the Egyptians were pretty bad-ass beekeepers, and they knew it. The Egyptians were so proud of their bees that they made bees the symbol of the lower kingdom from the First Dynasty on. That means they had already domesticated bees BEFORE 3,100 BCE. They were so good at harvesting wax and honey from their bees that they carved their methods into stone so no one could ever forget their apiary conquest. They also sent their dead off in sticky style with jars of tomb honey - because their honey was so good it transcended death.
Those Egyptians must have been pretty bad-ass to keep flying murder bugs in boxes with nothing but primitive instruments, right? Yeah, except everyone else used pretty much the exact same instruments as the Egyptians for thousands of years. The Egyptians were so good that nobody improved on their bee suit and smoke can methods until the 18th century CE.
It turns out honey makes some really nice mead, which is a great reason to make as much as possible. Up until the 18th century, the whole hive was smashed up at harvest time, which has the unfortunate side effect of mass murder on all the things that used to live in the hive. In the medieval period, Western European monasteries decided that less murder would be a convenient development for their booze production, so they came up with new hive designs which allowed the removal of some honey comb without destroying the parts of the hives that most of the bees had moved to.
It’s important to mention at this point that the combs in hives were still stationary. You built the box, the bees filled it with wax combs and the combs stayed there until somebody pilfered them. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that a man by the rather long and alliterative name of Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth designed a hive with removable frames that allowed the beekeeper to harvest honey and return the wax comb relatively unscathed.
That’s it. Modern beekeeping hasn’t changed much since Langstroth’s 1853 book, The Hive and Honey-bee spread his patented removable framed bee boxes around the world.
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1. You must write it yourself.
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4. Please title your submission/PM "Themed Writing Contest #5"!
