Traditional Beekeeping and Honey Hunting History

Somewhere in the Araña cave in Valencia, Spain, there's a painting. It's roughly 8,000 years old - Mesolithic, give or take a millennium - and it shows a human figure climbing a ladder or rope to reach a wild bee nest on a cliff face. The figure holds a container in one hand. Bees swirl around the figure's head. The proportions are off the way all Mesolithic art proportions are off, but the scene is unmistakable: someone is collecting honey from a wild colony, and the bees have opinions about it.

Similar scenes appear in rock art across three continents. The Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe. The Bhimbetka caves in India. The Cuevas de la Araña in Spain. The oldest may date to 15,000 years ago. Before agriculture. Before pottery. Before permanent settlement. Humans were climbing things and getting stung for honey before they figured out how to grow wheat.

This article is about every kind of beekeeping that existed before - and in many places still exists alongside - the Langstroth hive. The white box with removable frames dominates commercial beekeeping and the North American hobbyist market. It accounts for roughly 75 percent of beekeeping equipment worldwide. The other 25 percent - plus the millennia before 1852 - is a different story entirely.

The Bird

The Greater Honeyguide (Indicator indicator - yes, they named it twice) is a bird found across sub-Saharan Africa that does something no other wild animal reliably does: it cooperates with humans to find food.

The honeyguide eats beeswax. It can digest wax because it harbors wax-digesting bacteria in its gut - a metabolic trick almost no other vertebrate possesses. But the bird can't break into a wild bee nest on its own. The bees' defenses - the stinging, the cavity construction, the propolis sealing - are too much for a 50-gram bird.

So the honeyguide finds a human. It approaches, calls with a distinctive chattering sound, and flies a short distance in a specific direction. Then it waits. If the human follows, the bird flies again - another short hop, another wait. It leads the human through the bush to a wild bee nest, sometimes over distances of a kilometer or more. The human smokes the bees, opens the nest, takes the honey. The bird eats the wax and larvae left behind.

This mutualism has been documented most extensively among the Hadza people of northern Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies. The Hadza use a specific whistle to summon honeyguides, and the birds respond - approaching from up to a kilometer away when they hear the call. A 2016 study in Science by Claire Spottiswoode at Cambridge demonstrated that the honeyguide's response to the Hadza's honey-hunting call is significantly stronger than its response to other human sounds. The bird recognizes the specific signal that means "I'm looking for honey and I'll share."

The Yao people of Mozambique use a different call - a trilled "brr-hm" sound passed down through generations. Spottiswoode showed the honeyguide responds to that call too, with response rates tripling compared to control sounds. The bird has learned the local dialect.

Whether this relationship is truly mutualistic or more exploitative depends on who you ask. The humans take most of the honey. The bird gets the scraps. But the bird also gets access to a resource it couldn't access alone. And the humans find nests they'd never locate without the bird. Honey accounts for a significant percentage of the Hadza diet during peak season - some estimates put it at 15 percent of annual calories. In a landscape without grocery stores, a bird that leads you to sugar is worth following.

10 Million Colonies

Ethiopia has more bee colonies than any other country in Africa - approximately 10 million, depending on the survey year and how you count traditional hives versus modern ones. The country is the largest honey producer in Africa and one of the top 10 globally, producing roughly 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes annually.

The traditional Ethiopian beehive is a hollowed log, roughly a meter long and 30 centimeters in diameter, sealed at both ends with mud or cow dung, with a small entrance hole. These log hives are hung in trees - sometimes 20 or 30 hives in a single large tree - where they attract wild swarms. The beekeeper climbs the tree at harvest time, smokes the bees, and cuts out the comb. The wax, the brood, the honey, and the pollen come out together. There's no way to harvest selectively. There's no way to inspect the colony without destroying the comb architecture.

It works. It's worked for centuries. Ethiopia's beekeeping tradition predates written records in the region. The honey feeds a cultural institution that is distinctly Ethiopian: tej, a honey wine that functions as both a daily beverage and a ceremonial drink. Tej houses - bars dedicated specifically to honey wine - are everywhere in Addis Ababa and across the Ethiopian highlands. The drink is fermented with gesho (Rhamnus prinoides), a local buckthorn that provides the bittering agent in place of hops. Tej ranges from mildly sweet to dry, from 6 to 14 percent alcohol, and it is consumed in quantities that make honey one of the most economically important agricultural products in the country.

The Ethiopian government and various NGOs have spent decades trying to modernize the beekeeping sector. The Kenya Top-Bar Hive and the Langstroth hive have both been introduced. Adoption has been uneven. A top-bar hive costs more than a log hive (which costs essentially nothing if you have a log and a machete). It requires new skills. It requires a different relationship with the bees - inspection rather than harvest, management rather than collection. Some beekeepers have adopted modern hives alongside their traditional ones. Some haven't. The 10 million colonies include both, and the traditional log hives still outnumber the modern equipment by a wide margin.

The Sacred Bee of the Maya

On the Yucatan Peninsula, in the forests of what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, the ancient Maya practiced a form of beekeeping that had nothing to do with Apis mellifera. They kept stingless bees - specifically Melipona beecheii, which they called Xunan Kab, the Royal Lady.

Stingless bees (tribe Meliponini) are a diverse group of roughly 500 species found throughout tropical regions worldwide. They produce honey - less than honey bees, in smaller quantities, stored in pots of cerumen (a mixture of wax and plant resin) rather than in wax comb. The honey is thinner, more acidic, and more floral than Apis honey. It was - and in some communities still is - considered medicinal.

The Maya kept Melipona beecheii in hollowed logs called jobones, sealed at both ends with stone or mud discs. The practice is documented in the Madrid Codex, one of the few surviving Maya manuscripts, which shows beekeeping scenes and references to Ah Muzen Cab, the Maya bee god. The Codex depicts bees, hives, and honey harvesting in enough detail that entomologists have identified the species as Melipona from the illustrations.

Meliponiculture - stingless bee keeping - was widespread in Mesoamerica before European contact. The Spanish brought Apis mellifera to the New World in the 1600s. The European honey bee produced more honey, in more manageable quantities, in equipment that was easier to standardize. Melipona beecheii populations declined. The tradition of keeping them declined with it. By the late 20th century, the number of managed Melipona colonies in the Yucatan had dropped by an estimated 90 percent compared to pre-contact levels.

In 2026, meliponiculture is experiencing a revival. Small-scale keepers in Mexico, Brazil, and Australia maintain stingless bee colonies for honey production, pollination services, and conservation. The honey commands premium prices - $50 to $100 per kilogram in some markets, compared to $5 to $10 for conventional honey. The quantities are tiny. A strong Melipona colony produces 1 to 5 kilograms of honey per year. An Apis mellifera colony produces 25 to 60 kilograms. The economics are niche. But the biology is fascinating, and the cultural significance - particularly among indigenous communities in the Yucatan and the Amazon - is immeasurable.

The Other Honey Bee

The Western honey bee - Apis mellifera - is the bee of American beekeeping, European beekeeping, Australian beekeeping, and most of the global honey trade. It's also an introduction in most of those places. Apis mellifera is native to Africa, Europe, and western Asia. It was carried everywhere else by humans.

In eastern and southern Asia, there's a different bee: Apis cerana, the Asian honey bee. Smaller than mellifera, darker, with some critical behavioral differences. Apis cerana has a natural defense against Varroa destructor - the parasite that costs North American beekeepers billions - because it coevolved with the mite. Cerana workers detect mite-infested brood cells and remove them. They groom each other more aggressively. They perform the "heat ball" defense against giant hornets, surrounding the invader with a ball of bees and vibrating their flight muscles until the temperature rises to 45 degrees Celsius - above the hornet's lethal threshold but just below the bee's.

Traditional Apis cerana beekeeping in China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia involves log hives, clay pot hives, and wall hives - cavities built into the walls of houses or temples where colonies are established and harvested periodically. In rural China, log hive beekeeping with cerana is an unbroken tradition spanning centuries. The hives are simple: a section of hollow tree trunk, capped at both ends, with a small entrance. The colonies are smaller than mellifera colonies, produce less honey, and abscond more readily - meaning they'll abandon a hive that's disturbed too aggressively.

The tension between cerana and mellifera in Asia mirrors the tensions of modernization everywhere in beekeeping. Mellifera was introduced to China, Japan, and other Asian countries because it produces more honey. It's now the dominant managed species in Chinese commercial beekeeping. But cerana populations have declined as a result - displaced by competition, exposed to diseases brought by mellifera, and losing habitat as traditional management gives way to modern apiculture. Japan maintains a dedicated cerana japonica beekeeping culture, particularly in rural areas, but the numbers are small compared to the mellifera operations.

The Honey Hunters

In the forests of southern India, Nepal, and parts of Southeast Asia, another tradition persists: hunting the nests of Apis dorsata, the giant honey bee. Dorsata doesn't live in cavities. It builds a single massive exposed comb - sometimes a meter across - hanging from cliff faces, tree branches, or the undersides of buildings. A single colony can produce 20 to 40 kilograms of honey.

The honey hunters of the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu, the Gurung people of central Nepal, and various indigenous groups across Borneo and Sumatra climb to dorsata nests using rope ladders, bamboo scaffolding, or techniques that haven't changed in centuries. The work happens at night or at dawn, when the bees are less aggressive. Smoke is essential. The hunter cuts sections of comb, lowers them in baskets, and descends - ideally before the colony's defensive response escalates to the point where retreat becomes necessary.

In Nepal, the Gurung honey hunters are documented in films and photographs that have become globally famous. The cliff faces they climb are vertical. The drop is sometimes hundreds of feet. The bees are numerous, aggressive, and unhappy. The honey - particularly from Apis laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honey bee, which forages on rhododendron flowers at high elevations - is known as "mad honey" because it contains grayanotoxin, a compound that causes dizziness, hallucination, and cardiac arrhythmia in sufficient doses. It sells for $60 to $80 per pound in international markets, partly because of the danger involved in collecting it and partly because some buyers specifically want the psychoactive effects.

This is not beekeeping in any modern sense. It's gathering. The nest is destroyed in the harvest. The colony may rebuild, or it may not. The practice has existed for so long that the bees have no evolutionary defense against it - because, for dorsata, the defense is being enormous, aggressive, building on cliffs, and stinging anything that comes near. The honey hunters just bring smoke and rope and the understanding that the honey is worth the risk.

The Kenya Top-Bar Hive

In the 1960s and 1970s, development agencies working in East Africa needed a beekeeping technology that was cheaper than the Langstroth hive, simpler to build from local materials, and appropriate for beekeepers who had never used movable-frame equipment. The result was the Kenya Top-Bar Hive (KTBH) - a horizontal, trapezoidal trough with bars across the top from which bees build their comb naturally, without foundation.

The KTBH was designed for the developing world, but it found advocates everywhere. Top-bar hives are cheaper to build. They don't require foundation or an extractor. They allow comb inspection without heavy lifting - the bars are removed one at a time from the side, horizontally. The bees build natural comb in whatever cell size they prefer, which some beekeepers consider healthier than the foundation-imposed cell sizes of Langstroth equipment.

The trade-offs are real. Top-bar hives produce less honey than Langstroth hives - roughly half, in most comparative studies. The comb is fragile because it's not reinforced with foundation wire. The hives can't be easily stacked or transported for migratory pollination. Standardization is difficult because every builder makes theirs slightly different.

Bees for Development, the UK-based NGO founded by Nicola Bradbear, has been the most consistent advocate for appropriate-technology beekeeping in the developing world. Their argument: the best hive is the one a beekeeper will actually use, can afford, and can build from locally available materials. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, that's a top-bar hive. In some places, it's still a log. The Langstroth hive is optimal for honey production in a system with access to manufactured equipment, foundation, extractors, and a supply chain. It is not optimal for a subsistence farmer in rural Tanzania who has access to none of those things.

The Cork Hives of Portugal

In the Algarve region of southern Portugal and across the Mediterranean, beekeepers traditionally used cork bark to build cylindrical hives - a practice that persisted well into the 20th century and continues in some areas today. Portugal is one of the world's largest cork producers, and the material is ideal for beekeeping: lightweight, waterproof, insulating, and naturally resistant to rot.

Cork hives are simple cylinders, sealed at the ends, with a small entrance. Like log hives, they offer no movable frames and no non-destructive inspection. Like log hives, they work. The Mediterranean climate - mild winters, hot summers, long flowering seasons - is forgiving enough that crude hive designs can produce decent honey yields because the bees do most of the work regardless of their housing.

Similar cylindrical hive traditions existed across North Africa (clay pipe hives in Morocco, Egypt, and Libya), the Middle East (mud-plastered straw hives in Syria and Jordan), and parts of Eastern Europe (skep hives in Germany, wicker hives in the Balkans). The skep - the iconic straw dome that still appears on honey jar labels - was the standard across northern Europe for centuries. All of these traditions shared the same limitation: you couldn't inspect the colony without destroying it. You couldn't harvest honey without cutting comb. You couldn't manage disease because you couldn't see disease.

The Langstroth hive solved all of those problems. But it solved them for a specific context - commercial and semi-commercial beekeeping in industrialized countries with access to manufactured equipment. The traditional hives solved a different problem: keeping bees with whatever materials were at hand, in places where the nearest hardware store was a three-day walk.

Bangladesh Floats

In the Sundarbans - the vast mangrove delta spanning Bangladesh and India - beekeepers practice something found almost nowhere else: floating beekeeping. Colonies of Apis cerana and Apis dorsata are managed on boats. During the monsoon, when the land floods, the hives float. During the dry season, they're brought to shore. The honey produced in the Sundarbans mangrove forests is distinctive - dark, mineral, flavored by the nectar of Khalsi and Goran mangrove flowers.

The Mawali (or Mouali) - traditional honey collectors of the Sundarbans - enter the forest in groups during the honey season, traveling by boat through tiger-inhabited waterways to locate dorsata nests. The Sundarbans are home to the Royal Bengal Tiger. The honey collectors wear masks on the backs of their heads because tigers typically attack from behind. The masks are painted with human faces. Whether the masks work is debated. The honey collectors keep using them because the alternative is not using them.

Sundarbans honey is one of the most dangerous agricultural products to collect, not because of the bees but because of the ecosystem they live in. Crocodiles, tigers, venomous snakes, and tidal flooding are all occupational hazards. The honey sells for premium prices in Dhaka and Kolkata - partly for its flavor and partly because consumers know what the collectors went through to get it.

The Modernization Question

The global honey market is approximately $9 billion annually. China is the world's largest producer - roughly 450,000 tonnes per year - followed by Turkey, Argentina, Iran, and Ukraine. The United States produces about 125 million pounds annually and imports roughly the same amount, mostly from Argentina, Brazil, India, and Vietnam. The price differential between domestic and imported honey drives the import market: imported bulk honey can cost $1 per pound wholesale; domestic production costs $2 to $3 per pound.

The modernization of beekeeping - the spread of Langstroth hives, manufactured foundation, centrifugal extractors, and chemical mite treatments - has increased honey production per colony dramatically. A traditional log hive in Ethiopia produces 5 to 8 kilograms of honey per year. A well-managed Langstroth hive in the same climate produces 15 to 25 kilograms. The productivity difference is real.

But productivity isn't the only variable. A log hive costs nothing. A Langstroth hive costs $150 to $300, plus frames, foundation, a smoker, a hive tool, protective equipment, and - eventually - an extractor. A subsistence farmer who manages 50 log hives and harvests 300 kilograms of honey isn't necessarily better off switching to 20 Langstroth hives that produce 400 kilograms but required a capital investment that took three years to recoup.

The appropriate technology debate in beekeeping mirrors the same debate in agriculture generally: is the best technology the one that maximizes yield, or the one that maximizes sustainability within local economic and ecological constraints? The answer, predictably, depends on who's asking and what they're optimizing for.

15,000 Years

The rock art in the Araña cave shows a human, a ladder, a container, and bees. Fifteen thousand years later, the Hadza follow a bird to wild nests. Ethiopian beekeepers hang log hives in trees. Maya descendants tend Melipona colonies in hollow logs. Gurung hunters climb cliffs in Nepal. Mawali collectors enter tiger-inhabited mangrove forests by boat.

And in 2026, a beekeeper in Iowa opens a white Langstroth hive, pulls a frame, and inspects the brood pattern - using a technology that's 173 years old and so obviously correct that it's easy to forget it's not the only way.

The history of beekeeping isn't the history of the Langstroth hive. The Langstroth hive is the most recent chapter. The other chapters are older, stranger, more dangerous, and in some cases still being written by people who keep bees the way their grandparents did - not because they don't know about movable frames, but because a log, a tree, and a smoky fire have worked for longer than any patent, and they work still.