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Beekeeping
Beekeeping, is the practice of maintaining colonies of honey bees, in hives. A beekeepers keeps bees in order to collect honey and other products of the hive (including beeswax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers. The location where bees are kept is called an apiary.
Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dated to around 13,000 BC!
Domestication of wild bees
At some point humans began to domesticate wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels, and woven straw baskets or "skeps".
It was not until the 18th century that European natural philosophers undertook the scientific study of bee colonies and began to understand the complex and hidden world of bee biology.
Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed along with the eggs, larvae and honey that they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely strained through a sieve or basket.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw successive stages of a revolution in beekeeping, which allowed the bees themselves to be preserved when taking the honey crop, thus the modern form of beekeeping had begun.
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