Origins

Globally, there are more than 20,000 species of wild bees, including many which are solitary or which rear their young in burrows and small colonies, like mason bees and bumblebees. Beekeeping, or apiculture, is concerned with the practical management of the social species of honey bees, which live in large colonies of up to 100,000 individuals. In Europe and America the species universally managed by beekeepers is the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), which has several sub-species or regional varieties, such as the Italian bee (Apis mellifera ligustica ), European dark bee (Apis mellifera mellifera), and the Carniolan honey beeApis mellifera carnica). In the tropics, other species of social bee are managed for honey production, including Apis cerana. (

All of the Apis mellifera sub-species are capable of inter-breeding and hybridizing. Many bee breeding companies strive to selectively breed and hybridize varieties to produce desirable qualities: disease and parasite resistance, good honey production, swarming behaviour reduction, prolific breeding, and mild disposition. Some of these hybrids are marketed under specific brand names, such as the Buckfast Bee or Midnite Bee. The advantages of the initial F1 hybrids produced by these crosses include: hybrid vigor, increased honey productivity, and greater disease resistance. The disadvantage is that in subsequent generations these advantages may fade away and hybrids tend to be very defensive and aggressive.

Other bee-breeders are trying to resurrect original native varieties such as the British Black, the French Black or the Danish Black bee on the grounds of preserving biodiversity and producing more gentle bees. This native bee movement is notable in the UK (British Isles Bee Breeding Association; BIBBA), in Ireland (Galtee Bee Breeding Group), and in Denmark.

Wild honey harvesting

Collecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock painting, dating to around 13,000 BC. Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the colony.

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." The domestication of bees was well developed in Egypt and sealed pots of honey were found in the grave goods of Pharaohs such as Tutankhamun. Beekeeping was also documented by the Roman writers Virgil, Gaius Julius Hyginus, Varro, and Columella. Aspects of the lives of bees and beekeeping are discussed at length by Aristotle.

Archaeologist Amihai Mazar of Jerusalem's Hebrew University said that findings in the ruins of the city of Rehov (with 2,000 residents at that time, Israelites and Canaanites) include 30 intact hives, 900 B.C., and evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in the Holy Land at the time of the Bible or 3,000 years ago. The beehives -- made of straw and unbaked clay-- were found in orderly rows, with 100 hives. Ezra Marcus, expert of Haifa University, said the finding was a glimpse of ancient beekeeping seen in texts and ancient art from the Near East. Religious practice was evidenced by an altar decorated with fertility figurines found alongside the hives.

A beekeeper removing frames from the hive	A frame	Smoking the hive	Using a blower to remove bees from honey super prior to removal to honey house
Opening the cells: Uncapping	An uncapping fork	Uncapping the cells by hand using an uncapping knife	Extracting the honey

Study of honey bees

For several thousand years of human beekeeping, human understanding of the biology and ecology of bees was very limited and riddled with superstition and folklore. Ancient observers thought that the queen beeSwammerdam, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Charles Bonnet, and the blind Swiss scientist Francois Huber. Swammerdam and Réaumur were among the first to use a microscope and dissection to understand the internal biology of honey bees. Réaumur was among the first to construct a glass walled observation hive to better observe activities within hives. He observed queens laying eggs in open cells, but still had no idea of how a queen was fertilized; nobody had ever witnessed the mating of a queen and drone and many theories held that queens were "self-fertile," while others believed that a vapor or "miasma" emanating from the drones fertilized queens without direct physical contact. Huber was the first to prove by observation and experiment that queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the confines of hives, usually a great distance away. was in fact a male, called "the king bee," and they had no understanding of how bees actually reproduced. 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. Preeminent among these scientific pioneers were

Following Réaumur's design, Huber built improved glass-walled observation hives and sectional hives which could be opened, like the leaves of a book, to inspect individual wax combs; this greatly improved the direct observation of activity within a hive. Although he became blind before he was twenty, Huber employed a secretary, Francois Burnens, to make daily observations, conduct careful experiments, and to keep accurate notes over a period of more than twenty years. Huber confirmed that a hive consists of one queen who is the mother of all the female workers and male drones in the colony. He was also the first to confirm that mating with drones takes place outside of hives and that queens are inseminated by a number of successive matings with male drones, high in the air at a great distance from their hive. Together, he and Burnens dissected bees under the microscope and were among the first to describe the ovaries and spermatheca, or sperm store, of queens as well as the penis of male drones. Huber is universally regarded as "the father of modern bee-science" and his "Nouvelles Observations sur Les Abeilles (or "New Observations on Bees,  revealed all the basic scientific truths for the basics of the biology and ecology of honeybees.