Before humans directly husbanded bees, “honey hunting” was the favored method for acquiring wild honey and is still practiced in some parts of the world today. Intrepid hunters smoke bees out of the hive and take the honeycombs. Evidence of honey hunting reaches back to the Upper Paleolithic period (ca. 15,000 BC).

The so-called European honeybee (apis mellifera) is found in the Near East from central Iran, across the Zagros and Taurus Mountains into Anatolia and the Levant, and into Egypt (but not in Iraq or the Arabian Desert). As will be seen, the evidence for hive beekeeping in the ancient Near East is strong.

The earliest evidence for hive beekeeping (apiculture) comes from the Old Kingdom of Egypt (third millennium BC). A stone bas-relief from the sun temple of Niuserre Any at Abu Gurob depicts the gathering, filtering, and packing of honey, demonstrating that from a very early period beekeeping was well established in Egypt. Peasant beekeepers in Egypt today use much the same technology as that shown on ancient tomb paintings in Thebes. Typical pipe hives made of mud or clay are about a meter long and are stacked together, imitating logs. The ends are sealed except for small holes that allow the bees passage.

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Evidence for apiculture in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) is scarce. In a culture that has produced literally hundreds of thousands of extant cuneiform tablets detailing every conceivable aspect of life, including agriculture, the silence on beekeeping is striking. One notable problem surrounds the Mesopotamian word for “honey.” Akkadian dišpu (Sumerian làl) refers either to date syrup (Arabic dibs) or honey, so it is difficult to know which one is intended in a given passage. The bee does not feature prominently in Mesopotamian texts and not at all in art of the region. Most of the Akkadian words for “bee” appear only in lexical texts (i.e., not in everyday usage), and there is no technical vocabulary associated with beekeeping. The first recorded mention of beekeeping in the cuneiform record comes from the stele of Šamašreš-uzur, a regional governor on the Syrian Euphrates in the middle of the eighth century bc who claimed to have brought down bees from the mountains.

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Some ancient cultures attached a great deal of significance to bees and bee products. We have seen the high price of honey in Mesopotamia. Across the Near East its value was found in its use as a sweetener, in brewing beer, and as an ingredient in magico-medicinal recipes. Wax was used for writing boards and in the lost-wax method of sculpture. In Egypt honey was also used for funerary offerings and temple rituals and as rations for important officials. In the Middle Kingdom (2040–1640 bc) an important state official was called the “Overseer of the Beekeepers.”

Nomadic Beekeeping

Both the ancient world and contemporary traditional apiculture elicit some evidence for nomadic beekeeping, what the Germans call Wanderbienenzucht. Ancient hives (and modern Near Eastern peasant hives) were most often shaped like pipes or logs (where bees naturally swarm) and were made from pottery, wicker, mud, clay, and wood. All of these hives would be portable on pack animals and boats.

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The value of bees in a nomadic journey would be high because of the calorific value of a regular honey supply. Honey is also a useful trading commodity. Libyan nomads, for example, traded honey and wax for sugar, tea, rice, and cloth.31 Migratory beekeeping was the means through which bee species were introduced to new regions. For example, it is thought that beekeeping was introduced to Iran from Pakistan via Baluchistan.

Pre-Columbian American Beekeeping

The apis mellifera species was not found in the New World until it was imported from about the seventeenth century ad onward. The indigenous American bee is the melipona (a stingless bee). It produces only about one kilogram of honey per year (compared with apis mellifera, which can produce fifty kilograms). Nevertheless, pre-Columbian Americans did indeed have knowledge of beekeeping and made the most of the melipona. Cortés wrote to the king of Spain in 1519 about the extent of beekeeping among the Indians of Cozumel (Mexico):

The only trade which the Indians have is in bee hives, and our Procurators will bear to Your Highness specimens of the honey and the bee hives that you may commend them to be examined.

The earliest archaeological evidence for American apiculture comes from the Late Preclassic Maya period (ca. 300 BC–AD 300). Modern peasant apiculture in the Yucatán is reminiscent of Egyptian beekeeping: hives (often hollowed-out logs) are stacked vertically on a rack. The lost-wax technique was known in the New World, and the ancient Maya pantheon included a bee god called Ah Mucan Cab.

A Final Note

Any study of the possible material culture background of historical Book of Mormon peoples has to make careful use of the interesting data provided by Ether 1–3, including the suggestion that the Jaredites were migratory apiculturalists. This brief study has demonstrated the widespread evidence for beekeeping, including migratory beekeeping, in the ancient Near East. A further discussion of this evidence, and the implications that may arise from it, will be the subject of future research.