Did you know
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Flowers and bees have been around for 100,000,000 years - the age of the dinosaurs.
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The world’s oldest bee fossil was found in a piece of amber believed to be 100 million years old.
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Scientists have discovered genes of a bee that lived 25 million years ago.
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In 20 million years B.C. honeybees and mammals were new. After the Ice Age, ancient people learned to use smoke to calm bees.
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20,000 year old rock art images in Zimbabwe and South Africa depict people gathering honey.
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Apiarists believe that Egyptians were the first beekeepers.
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The art of beekeeping was well established along the Nile by 2,400 BC.
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The main centre of bee keeping was Lower Egypt, where one of the symbols for that part of the country was a bee.
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One of the Pharaoh’s titles was Bee King.
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The Egyptians kept bees in clay and mud hives.
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The ancient Greeks studied new ways of raising bees.
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Romans used melted beeswax and dye to paint pictures.
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In the Middle Ages, beekeepers started using straw masks and hoods to be protected from stings.
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In Tudor times the rich people ate sugar as a sweetener - making most of their teeth black and rotten. The poor people couldn’t afford sugar so relied on honey as a sweetener - they kept beehives in their gardens. The poor people sometimes blackened their teeth to make out that they were rich!
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In Tudor times honeybees were not striped as they are today, they were totally black.
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The Pilgrim Fathers took the first honeybees to America. There were honeybees in California by 1820.
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American pioneers used boxes to trap bees. They would then release them and follow the bee back to the hive and take the honey.
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The first movable frame-hive was invented and patented in 1851 by the Reverend LL Langstroth and was reputedly made from a recycled champagne crate.
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In recent times, bees have built a honeycomb in zero gravity on a space shuttle.
Page last updated: 16 August, 2011
