Somewhere in the foothills of eastern Spain, a prehistoric artist climbed into a cave and painted a human figure scaling ropes toward a wild bee nest, basket in hand, surrounded by angry dots representing bees.
That image in the Cuevas de la Araña near Valencia dates back approximately 8,000 years. The figure isn't a beekeeper. Beekeeping didn't exist yet. The figure is a honey hunter - someone taking from wild colonies without any attempt to maintain them.
The transition from hunting honey to keeping bees took several thousand more years. Understanding that transition helps explain how beekeeping became what it is today.
Honey hunting (prehistory)
Before beekeeping, there was honey hunting.
The practice required finding wild colonies - usually in tree cavities or cliff faces - and extracting whatever honey and comb could be reached. Smoke helped calm the bees. Speed helped avoid too many stings. The colony was left damaged or destroyed, and the hunter moved on.
The Spanish cave paintings show this: the figure climbs toward a nest, surrounded by disturbed bees. A basket or container hangs ready.
Honey hunting persists today among the Gurung people of Nepal, who climb cliff faces on rope ladders to harvest from Apis laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honeybee. The Veddhas of Sri Lanka and Bedouin groups in the Syrian desert continue similar traditions. The techniques would be recognizable to whoever painted those Spanish caves 8,000 years ago.
Honey hunting works when wild colonies are abundant and human population density is low. As settlements grew and wild colonies became harder to find, people began experimenting with ways to keep bees closer to home.
Early domestication (Ancient Egypt, ~2450 BCE)
The earliest evidence of organized beekeeping comes from Egypt around 2450 BCE.
Relief carvings in the Solar Temple of Nyuserra at Abu Gorab show beekeepers working with cylindrical hives, using smoke, extracting comb, pressing honey, and sealing it into storage vessels. Hieroglyphics label the scenes: "hymning, filling, pressing and sealing of honey."
Egyptian beekeeping was sophisticated: beekeepers transported hives up and down the Nile to follow seasonal blooms, moving colonies on boats and donkeys. They stacked hives into walls, sometimes managing hundreds of colonies. They understood smoke as a calming agent and developed systematic extraction methods.
Honey served multiple functions in Egyptian society. It was a sweetener, a medicine, a preservative, and a religious offering. Administrators accepted honey as tax payment. Jars of honey placed in tombs have been found still preserved after millennia. According to mythology, the tears of the sun god Ra became bees upon touching the earth.
Egyptian beekeeping knowledge spread throughout the Mediterranean. Greek writers documented beekeeping practices, and Aristotle devoted substantial attention to bee behavior in Historia Animalium, making observations about colony organization and communication that wouldn't be fully understood for another two thousand years. Roman agricultural writers like Virgil, Varro, and Columella wrote detailed guides to beekeeping that remained influential for centuries.
Medieval beekeeping (Europe, ~500-1700 CE)
Beekeeping in medieval Europe centered on two products: honey and wax.
Honey was the primary sweetener available to most people. Sugar existed as an expensive import from distant lands. Honey sweetened food, preserved fruit, and fermented into mead. Every manor, monastery, and farming community that could keep bees did so.
Beeswax held equal or greater importance. The Catholic Church required beeswax candles for liturgical use - tallow candles were considered impure. Monasteries became centers of beekeeping expertise, maintaining large apiaries to supply their own candle needs and generate income from surplus wax. During this period, bees became powerful symbols in European culture. The phrase "busy as a bee" entered common usage, and religious and civic institutions adopted the beehive as an emblem of industriousness, cooperation, and moral virtue.
Medieval beekeepers managed colonies in skeps (straw domes), log hives, and various regional containers. Management was largely hands-off by modern standards. Beekeepers provided housing, protected colonies from predators, and harvested honey and wax at the end of the season.
Skeps—baskets placed open-end-down—were used for approximately 2,000 years. They were made of coils of grass or straw, and sometimes mud, clay, or animal dung. A single entrance at the bottom allowed bees to come and go. Skeps provided a dark, enclosed cavity that mimicked the hollow trees bees naturally inhabit
But skeps had two significant disadvantages: beekeepers could not inspect the comb for diseases and pests, and honey removal was difficult—often resulting in the destruction of the entire colony. Beekeepers either drove the bees out of the skep or killed them, sometimes using lighted sulfur, to allow the honeycomb to be removed. Skeps could also be squeezed in a vise to extract the honey. (As of 1998, most U.S. states prohibited the use of skeps for this reason.)
The harvest typically killed the colony. Without access to individual combs, beekeepers extracted honey by destroying the hive structure, usually after suffocating the bees with sulfur smoke. Colonies were treated as an annual crop rather than a perennial resource.
Strong colonies might be kept alive by leaving sufficient honey for winter, but many beekeepers simply started fresh each spring with swarms caught from surviving colonies or purchased from other keepers.
Forest beekeeping developed as a distinct practice across Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, tree beekeepers—called "Zeidler" in German and "bartnik" in Polish—observed and marked bee trees with a family mark, taking possession of the bee colony. They cut notches in the tree to climb up and reach the bees, often 5 to 25 meters above the ground. The height protected colonies from bears and human thieves. A door was attached to the side of the entrance hole to make it easier to reach the colonies.
Tree beekeepers formed professional guilds with their own legal traditions and jurisdiction—in 1350, Emperor Karl IV granted German tree beekeepers (Zeidlers) their own legal privileges. In the most developed regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 16th and 17th centuries, tree beekeepers formed communities called "Fratrum Mellocidarum" and managed registered areas of forest.
In the eastern and southeastern United States, a parallel tradition developed: hollow sections of black gum trees were set up in apiaries. These "hives" were called "gums" after the trees from which they came. Occasionally, small sticks were placed over the open top to provide support for honeycomb construction. As with European forest beekeeping, the hive and colony typically had to be destroyed to harvest the honey.
Forest beekeeping largely disappeared from Europe by the end of the 19th century as forests were cleared and legal bans were imposed to prioritize timber. However, the tradition survived in the Shulgan Tash Nature Reserve in Russia's southern Ural Mountains. In 2020, UNESCO added Polish and Belarusian tree beekeeping to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The transition to modern beekeeping (18th-19th century)
Two developments transformed beekeeping from medieval husbandry into something resembling modern practice: the movable frame and the understanding of bee biology.
Throughout the 1700s, beekeepers experimented with hive designs that allowed access to individual combs without destroying the colony. The traditional basket top-bar (movable-comb) hives of Greece, known as "Greek beehives," are considered forerunners of modern hives with movable frames. In 1676, basket top-bar hives were reported in use by monks in a monastery on Mt. Hymettus, near Athens. A ceramic top-bar hive was described by Papadopoli in 1696 used in Crete, where it was known as "Vraski" or "Fraski."
The conceptual breakthrough came from François Huber (1750–1831), a Swiss entomologist who developed a new type of hive in which each comb had glass sides—the ancestors of our modern observation hives. Huber's "leaf hive," invented in Switzerland in 1789, was a fully movable frame hive. The combs in this hive were examined like pages in a book. A.I. Root and E.R. Root credit Huber with inventing the first movable frame hive.
Huber's design was revolutionary in concept: for the first time, beekeepers could inspect brood patterns, observe queen behavior, and study comb construction without tearing the colony apart. But the leaf hive had practical limitations—bees sealed the frames together with propolis, making them difficult to separate. The design worked beautifully for scientific observation but proved cumbersome for everyday beekeeping.
Building on this insight, Thomas Wildman, Petro Prokopovych, and Jan Dzierżon developed various frame and bar arrangements across Europe.
Lorenzo Langstroth's 1852 patent unified these efforts by systematically applying "bee space" - the specific gap that bees leave open as passageways. His hive design made routine colony inspection practical for the first time. Beekeepers could examine brood patterns, assess queen health, check for disease, and harvest honey without killing bees or destroying comb.
Around the same time, scientific understanding of bee biology advanced rapidly. The roles of queens, workers, and drones were clarified. The mechanism of fertilization was understood. The function of the waggle dance, though not fully decoded until Karl von Frisch's work in the 1940s, began to be observed and documented.
The combination of practical hive design and biological understanding created modern beekeeping. Beekeepers could now manage colonies as ongoing biological systems rather than annual honey-producing units to be killed at harvest
Commercial and migratory beekeeping (20th century)
Modern beekeeping scaled.
The movable-frame hive made it possible to maintain colonies year after year, building up population and honey production over time. Standardized equipment meant operations could expand without custom fabrication. The honey extractor (invented 1865) allowed comb to be reused rather than crushed, increasing efficiency further.
Commercial beekeeping emerged as a distinct occupation. Operations grew from dozens of colonies to hundreds, then thousands. Migratory beekeeping developed as beekeepers learned to move colonies to follow nectar flows or provide pollination services across large distances.
Pollination became increasingly important economically. As monoculture agriculture expanded, crops that depended on insect pollination - almonds, apples, blueberries, cucumbers, melons - required more pollinators than local wild populations could provide. Commercial beekeepers began contracting with farmers to move colonies into fields during bloom.
The California almond industry became the largest example. Almonds require cross-pollination and bloom in February, before most local bee populations have built up. By the late 20th century, almond pollination required roughly two-thirds of all managed honeybee colonies in the United States, trucked in from across the country. The economic value of pollination services came to exceed the value of honey production for many commercial operations.
This intensification brought stresses. Colonies moved long distances, exposed to multiple agricultural environments, fed artificial diets when natural forage was unavailable, and treated repeatedly for diseases and parasites. Colony losses became an industry concern.
Varroa and the modern crisis (1980s-present)
The arrival of Varroa destructor changed beekeeping fundamentally.
Varroa mites originated in Asia, where they parasitized Apis cerana, a bee species that had evolved alongside them. When the mites spread to Apis mellifera - the European honeybee used in most commercial beekeeping - colonies had no evolved defenses. The mites spread globally during the 1970s and 1980s, reaching the United States in 1987.
Varroa mites weaken bees directly by feeding on fat bodies, and indirectly by transmitting viral diseases. Untreated colonies typically die within one to three years. Managing Varroa became a central concern of modern beekeeping, requiring regular monitoring and treatment with various miticides.
Colony Collapse Disorder, identified around 2006, brought broader public attention to honeybee health. CCD described a pattern where worker bees abandoned hives, leaving behind queens and brood. The causes remained debated - pesticide exposure, pathogens, nutritional stress, and Varroa were all implicated - but the phenomenon highlighted the cumulative stresses on managed honeybee populations.
Annual colony losses in the United States have averaged 30-40% in recent years, with some years exceeding 40%. Commercial beekeepers compensate by splitting surviving colonies and purchasing replacement bees, maintaining total colony numbers but at significant cost. The question of whether current beekeeping practices are sustainable at their current intensity remains open.
Hobbyist and alternative beekeeping
Hobbyist beekeeping never disappeared. Even as commercial operations scaled up in the 20th century, backyard beekeepers continued keeping one or two hives for household honey, pollination of home gardens, and the satisfaction of working with bees.
What changed in the late 20th and early 21st century was visibility and organization. Beekeeping clubs proliferated. Books and courses targeting beginners multiplied. Urban beekeeping grew as cities relaxed ordinances prohibiting hives. Rooftop apiaries appeared on restaurants, hotels, and corporate headquarters. The "local food" movement brought new attention to backyard honey production.
"Natural beekeeping" emerged as a philosophy emphasizing minimal intervention, avoidance of chemical treatments, and practices intended to support bee health rather than maximize honey production. Top-bar hives and Warré hives gained popularity among hobbyists interested in alternatives to Langstroth equipment. Treatment-free beekeeping—allowing colonies to live or die without Varroa treatments—attracted practitioners who hoped to breed mite-resistant bees through natural selection.
The relationship between commercial and hobbyist beekeeping has sometimes been tense—though significant debate also exists within the hobbyist community itself. Some commercial beekeepers argue that treatment-free colonies become Varroa reservoirs that spread mites to neighboring apiaries. Some hobbyists respond that chemical-dependent beekeeping created the problem in the first place by preventing natural resistance from developing. Others take more moderate positions, and many beekeepers—commercial and hobbyist alike—are simply trying to find what works best for their bees and circumstances.
This tension reflects a broader question about what beekeeping is for: is the goal maximum honey production and pollination services? Colony health and longevity? Bee welfare independent of human use? Supporting wild pollinator populations?
Different answers lead to different practices, priorities and even competing legislation.
Where beekeeping stands now
Beekeeping has always spanned a range of scales. That remains true.
Commercial operations manage tens of thousands of colonies, trucking them across continents for pollination contracts, treating routinely for Varroa, replacing queens on scheduled cycles, and measuring success primarily in economic terms.
Sideliners run a few hundred colonies, often balancing beekeeping with other work, selling honey locally or regionally.
Hobbyists manage anywhere from one hive to a few dozen, sometimes selling surplus honey, sometimes just keeping bees for the pleasure of it.
Researchers study bee biology, colony health, and the effects of various stressors with increasing sophistication. Thermal imaging, genetic analysis, and continuous monitoring technologies reveal aspects of colony life invisible to earlier generations of beekeepers.
The relationship has grown more complex with each era. What began as opportunistic hunting became systematic husbandry, then industrial agriculture, and now exists across a spectrum from intensive commercial production to backyard hobbyism to academic research.
And the practice keeps adapting. It always has.
Recent research into hive thermodynamics represents one of the newest frontiers in beekeeping innovation.
Scientists and hive designers are now studying how bees regulate temperature within the colony—maintaining the brood nest at a precise 34–36°C (93–97°F)—and how hive construction materials and design can support or hinder this natural thermoregulation.
Our own studies (and countless others) have shown that bees in poorly insulated hives must expend significantly more energy to maintain optimal temperatures, leaving fewer resources for foraging, brood-rearing, and honey production. This research is driving a new generation of hive designs that prioritize thermal efficiency, using advanced materials and engineering to create environments where bees can thrive with less effort. It may prove to be the next major step in the evolution of beekeeping.
