How were honey bees discovered?

Answer 1

It is impossible to say where the very first wasps came from. The oldest fossilised wasp found so far is about 115 million years old, and it is thought they date back before the advent of the angiosperms, or flowering plants, some 120 million years ago.

Bees evolved from wasps to feed from the nectar of these flowers, and the oldest bee fossil found so far is a bee body preserved in amber, and dated to about 100 million years ago.

Answer 2

No-one really knows, but man has been collecting honey since pre-historic times. There is a cave painting near Valencia, Spain, showing a man collecting honey from wild bees. This painting is estimated to be at least 7,000 years old.

Answer 3

Honey bees evolved from wasps about fifty million years ago. This is about the same time as the first flowering plants evolved, and bees and flowers have been co-evolving ever since.

It is thought they first appeared in southern Asia and gradually spread through Asia and Europe. Bees are not native to the Americas or Australasia and were introduced to those regions by early European settlers.

Answer 4

South Asia appears to be where honeybees come from.

Specifically, honeybees (Apis spp) are thought to originate in South and Southeast Asia. The oldest fossils date back about 34,000,000 years ago to Europe. This may be due to the faster decomposition of organisms in subtropical and tropical climates and therefore the greater ease in fossil retrieval and the stronger commitment of economic and intellectual resources. Scientists tend to be influenced by the origins of six of today's seven surviving honeybee species in South and Southeast Asia, with the seventh (Apis mellifera) calling eastern tropical Africa home.

Answer 5

Honey has been a part of human culture for over 10,000 years and it's pretty well-known, especially to anyone close to the honey making process that it's the nectar from flowers, mixed with regurgitated bee saliva and enzymes that makes the honey.

It's very unlikely any one person in recorded history can be credited with "discovering" how honey was produced. As far back as the 5th Egyptian dynasty (about 2,500 BC), there are Egyptian hieroglyphs that depict people using smoke to harvest honeycombs, meaning, by that point they were keeping their own bees (beekeepers as a profession), as opposed to harvesting it in the wild.

One can only speculate by that time they were aware that bees left the hive and returned with the nectar and residual pollen to make the honey. It's virtually impossible to know if at that point they were aware the worker bees were regurgitating the pollen mixed with bee saliva and enzymes to create the honey but it's very doubtful more than another thousand years would go by without them witnessing first hand the bees producing the honey, as you can see this regurgitation process with the naked eye.

(there are many videos on the internet of this process and it's easy to see the bees regurgitating honey with the naked eye, so you have to assume any people that worked closely with bees back even thousands of years would have witnessed this process for themselves).

Answer 6

[1] The oldest honey bee fossils have been found in Europe. [2] But it's thought that honey bees came from South and Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. There are seven living species of honey bees, and all but one are native to the previously mentioned areas. [1] The oldest honey bee fossils have been found in Europe. [2] But it's thought that honey bees came from South and Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. There are seven living species of honey bees, and all but one are native to the previously mentioned areas.

Answer 7

Eastern tropical Africa, South Asia, and southeast Asia are identified as the point of origin for honey bees. The argument centers upon the fact that Apis mellifera appears to have spread from Africa to Eurasia and that all other extant honey bee species seem to have originated in Asia. The two earliest known of the seven extant species, Apis andreniformis and A. florea, represent species native to Asia.

Answer 8

wasps came from Europe