Bees through history
Bees and people: a 9,000-year history
People have hunted honey, kept bees and told stories about them since before writing existed. This timeline traces the partnership from the first cave paintings to the science and crises of today.
Updated 2026-11-10 · Fact-checked against the sources listed at the end.
Timeline
Bees evolve from wasp ancestors as flowering plants spread. The oldest known bee in amber, from Myanmar, is about 100 million years old.
Beeswax residues in Neolithic pottery from Anatolia (modern Turkey) show people were using bee products at least 9,000 years ago.
A rock painting in the Cuevas de la Araña near Valencia, Spain, shows a person climbing to gather honey from a wild nest.
Egyptian reliefs in the sun temple of King Nyuserre show beekeepers working horizontal pipe hives, smoking bees and storing honey. The bee was a symbol of Lower Egypt.
Tel Rehov, in Israel: archaeologists found the oldest known apiary, rows of clay cylinder hives, excavated in 2007.
Aristotle writes about bees in History of Animals, though he thinks the colony is led by a "king."
Virgil's Georgics, Book IV, is a poem about beekeeping, including the ancient myth that bees are born from dead oxen.
The Maya keep stingless Melipona bees in log hives, a tradition that continues in the Yucatán.
Straw skeps spread across Europe. Monasteries keep bees for honey and the beeswax candles used in churches.
Colonists bring honey bees to North America; records from Virginia in the 1620s are often cited as the first.
Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie argues the colony's leader is female; in the 1600s Jan Swammerdam's dissections confirm the "king" is a queen.
Blind Swiss naturalist François Huber, with his assistant François Burnens, publishes observations from a glass "leaf hive," showing that queens mate outside the hive.
Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth patents a movable-frame hive built around "bee space," founding modern beekeeping.
Johannes Mehring invents wax foundation (1857), Franz von Hruschka the centrifugal honey extractor (1865), and Moses Quinby an improved bellows smoker.
Elton Dyce at Cornell patents the process for creamed honey.
African honey bees imported to Brazil escape in 1957; their Africanized descendants spread north and reach Texas in 1990.
Karl von Frisch shares the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding the honey bee dance language.
The varroa mite is first detected in the United States.
The small hive beetle is first identified in the U.S., in Florida.
Beekeepers report sudden, unexplained colony losses; the syndrome is named Colony Collapse Disorder. National loss surveys begin.
Seven Hawaiian yellow-faced bees (2016) and the rusty patched bumble bee (2017) become the first U.S. bees listed under the Endangered Species Act.
The USDA grants a conditional license to the first honey bee vaccine, against American foulbrood.
U.S. beekeepers lose an estimated 55.6% of colonies, a record. USDA scientists link many collapses to mite-borne viruses and amitraz-resistant mites.
Losses fall to 39.9% but remain far above the 15–20% beekeepers consider sustainable. U.S. honey production in 2025 hits a record low of 116 million pounds.
Bees as a symbol
- Egypt: a myth said bees were born from the tears of the sun god Ra.
- Greece: priestesses of Delphi and Artemis were called melissai, "bees."
- France: Napoleon used the bee as an emblem of his empire.
- Manchester, England: the worker bee is the city's symbol of industry.
- Utah: the "Beehive State" puts a beehive on its seal and flag.
- "Telling the bees": in English and New England folklore, families told their bees about births, marriages and deaths, so the bees would not leave.
Sources
- Roffet-Salque, M. et al. (2015), widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers, Nature
- Mazar, A. & Panitz-Cohen, N. (2007), the Tel Rehov apiary, Near Eastern Archaeology
- Crane, E. (1999), The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Routledge
- Poinar, G. & Danforth, B. (2006), a fossil bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese amber, Science
- USDA ARS and APHIS records; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listings
- Auburn University / Apiary Inspectors of America, U.S. Beekeeping Survey; USDA NASS, Honey (2026)