Humans Have Relied on Honeybees for 9,000 Years -- Now a Decline

"With the help of 20 years’ worth of research and thousands of prehistoric shards of pottery, a large group of scientists have presented evidence that the deep relationship between humans and honeybees is far older than we thought — giving us just one more reason to care about the conservation of a species that we’ve relied on for thousands of years.

Honeybees are a cornerstone of modern agriculture, valued both for their importance as pollinators and for the honey and wax they produce. Today, they’re considered a largely domesticated organism, commonly kept by humans in managed hives — but it wasn’t always this way. Like all domesticated creatures, honeybees  started out as wild animals.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a group of researchers find that the relationship between humans and honeybees goes back all the way to the Neolithic age, starting around 8,000 years ago. They figured this out by analyzing residue found in Neolithic pottery from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to see if beeswax was present. Finding beeswax residue in pottery suggests that humans were exploiting bees to use their wax (and probably their honey, too)."

Chelsea Harvey reports for The Washington Post November 11, 2015.