History Of Beekeeping – Transition From Science To
No one can pin a date on when humans learnt to cultivate bees for their honey. Neither can anyone say for sure when man learnt that honey can be consumed. Perhaps man observed the bears and other animals in the trees pursuing honey bee hives and taking the honey from it and eating it. And as always man - following his 'monkey see, monkey do' instinct tried it out for taste and discovered that honey had a unique sweet taste of its own.
All this probably happened around 700 years before Christ. We can fix this date by the drawings on the caves where prehistoric man lived. It is not difficult for scientists to fix dates on caves based on radio carbon dating of skins and bones along with other organic remnants found in the cave. However, scientists seem to think that the drawings depicted on the walls of the caves tell tales of humans standing around a bee hive and are absolutely unaffected by the bees. Could this mean that they had discovered some pre-historic 'Bee Go' to ward off the bees. Bee Go is a chemical that bee keepers smear on a tray and leave it in the hive to encourage the bees to move to the bottom of the hive.
Man might have discovered that smearing some similar substance on their bodies would prevent the bees from stinging them while they collected the honey from the hive. What is a fact is, however, that man did learn that smoke was a very useful tool in scaring the bees away from the hive while they dismantled it from the tree. This was no guarantee of not getting stung though.
As civilization progressed man learnt to cultivate the honey bee. First indications of bee keeping are the clay and mud pottery scientists have found. Artificial bee hives had been constructed out of clay pottery to encourage bees to build their hives in them. When the honey was ready for harvesting the bees were driven out and the pot was broken to remove the honey.
Swarms of bees were trapped in these containers and kept there captive. Once they decided to make the hive their home the bees were allowed to come and go as they pleased making honey in the process.
Time advanced and so did the human intelligence. Man began to study the habits of bees and made uniquely designed hives for the honey bee. These wooden hives as we know them today are engineered to keep the reproduction part of the hive away from the food (larder) section. This way the bee keeper can only remove the honey combs without disturbing the off spring at the same time not having to remove all the bee's food.
Author: Abhishek Agarwal
Abhishek is an avid Bee Keeping enthusiast and he has got some great Beekeeping Secrets up his sleeve! Download his FREE 59 Pages Ebook, "How To Become A Bee-Keeping Pro!" from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/89/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.
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