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History of Beekeeping

The world of honeybees faces a host of problems today. As we look back, we find that bees have played a very important role in our development. They are an integral part of the system that helped us sustain through the years and without bees, we definitely would not have been able to live the life we do today.

Another fact that shows the importance of bees is that they have been kept by man from time immemorial.

The first recorded history of beekeeping can be found at the ancient cave paintings in Spain and Africa that depict pictures of people around bee hives collecting honey. These paintings are as old as 15,000 years. It is amazing indeed to find that bees have been an indispensable part of our lives for so long.

Through ages, the only reason why man has been keeping bees is for the wax and honey. Apart from being used as an anti bacterial agent, honey was also used to sweeten a range of drinks and foods such as bread and wine.

Wax, on the other hand, was used to make mead that was a drink taken by monks in monasteries, candles, medicines and as binding agents in paints. Beehives have been created for the purpose of bee keeping for quite some time now.

In places such as Nepal and Africa, people still follow the traditional method of collecting honey from wild hives. With passage of time, people started realizing that keeping beehives provides immense benefits which are one of the reasons for their popularity today.

The practice of gathering honey in basic hives was prevalent in one of the earliest civilizations, Egypt. Any place that was dark and enclosed was sufficient for the swarm to settle.

You can also find many references to beekeeping among the ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancient hives however had a major drawback. The moment honey was collected from the hives the colonies were destroyed by the beekeepers.

19th Century saw the emergence of the first ever comb hive. This hive was created by an American based Italian immigrant Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth. A book called "The Hive and the Honey Bee", published in the year 1853 acted as an inspiration that led to the creation of the comb hive.

This book had detailed description of how to find the 'bee space' which is nothing but the distance between honeycombs created by the bees in a natural manner to enable them to move through.

The modern hive enabled extraction of honey without damaging the colony and also allows for examining and inspecting individual honeycombs. Today, thanks to Langstroth, it is possible to use the bees for various purposes including pollination of huge areas of agricultural land.

The amount of food we produce today is made possible only with the help of the bees and devices such as comb hives enable important large scale practices towards enhancing agricultural development.

Matthew is an expert in beekeeping. For more great information on beekeeping, visit http://www.howtobeekeep.com - [http://www.makemoneyfromhoney.com]http://www.makemoneyfromhoney.com.

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