Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
– Proverbs 16:24 (NIV)
The relationship between man and bee is Milenniums old.
Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date back 10,000 years. Honey would be foraged in trees and rocky overhangs where bees would build hives.
Heres is a painting discovered at Arana Cave, near Valencia, Spain, that depicts a person climbing a ladder to gather honey from a hive on a cliff face.
Honey was used not only as a food source, it was also used as a medicine and as a part of religious rituals. Because of this, honey needed to be easily collected.
Enter the beekeeper.
There is evidence showing Jewish laws dating back to around 600 BCE (B.C.) which speaks to collecting honey on the Sabbath and even how close beehive should be to a persons home.
The oldest archaeological find, directly related to beekeeping, date back to about 900 BCE (B.C.), where 30 intact hives, made of straw and unbaked clay, were found at Rehov, in the Jordan Valley, Israel.
Egyptian Hieroglyphs also show the domestication of bees from around 4,500 years ago.
These ancient beekeepers shared their knowledge with new beekeepers, insuring the successful management of bees for millennia to come.