Beekeeping may go back to the early years of agriculture, up to 9,000 years ago

Archaeologists have found evidence on pottery that people were using honeycomb at least 9,000 years ago. A research team from several European institutions has found the distinctive chemical signature of honeycomb or beeswax on pottery shards from Europe, the Near East and North Africa, says a new paper in the journal Nature.

The team speculates that the origins of beekeeping, or domestication of Apis mellifera, may have been as far back as the Stone Age. Early farmers possibly lived alongside and worked with honeybees to produce the semi-liquid honey that has fascinated humankind for so long. Or the prehistoric people may have been harvesting wild honey.

Because bees are small and organic, evidence of them has all but disappeared from the archaeological record, though they and their products have a rich tradition in myth, symbolism and history from the time of the Babylonians, ancient Egyptians and others.