It turns out even honeybees from 9,000 years ago were not safe from farmers taking the fruits of their labor for themselves.
Years of research found that humans have been consuming honey as early as 4,000 to 9,000 years ago when a team of archeologist revealed that traces of beeswax were found in cooking vessels from the Stone Age.
Researchers said that while honey is known to exist and be used since ancient times, thanks to evidence found on Egyptian stone wall paintings, no one until now knew how long ago exactly honey has been a part of man's daily living.
The colonies, however, were limited to Northern Europe at the time due to the climate, as there were no traces of beeswax in pottery samples from northern Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland.
"Although evidence...suggests mankind's association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown until now," Richard Evershed, a chemist from the University of Bristol, said.
The cooking vessels and pottery with traces of beeswax were found in Neolithic wares from Denmark to southern Britain, from Algeria to the Balkans, with the oldest pot coming from Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Researchers wrote that bees and honey have been continuously exploited by man for millennia, most likely for more than just food like technological and cultural applications.
"Beeswax could have been used in its own right for various technological, ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes, for example, to waterproof porous ceramic vessels," Mélanie Roffet-Salque, a fellow chemist from the University of Bristol, said, though she does not discount the use of honey on food, adding that it must have been a rare sweetener for the prehistorics.
While honey is downright useful both in and out of the kitchen, the question as to how prehistoric men were able to acquire this delicious but fiercely guarded bee made product still remains.
Up until now, researchers are not quite sure how Stone Age men did it, but Roffet-Salque suggests that the ancestors went out in honey hunting groups, following bees to their hives in forests. It is also not entirely impossible that they were even able to make rudimentary log hives for the bees by using a hollowed log to put bees in.
To then harvest the beeswax, the people may have harvested honeycombs and pressed it down to separate the honey from the wax.
The research proved that man had been dependent on bees since ancient times, something researchers described as a widespread exploitation of the honey making insects.
"It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates," Evershed pointed out.
The team's research paper is published on the Nature journal.
