History In The Making!

The earliest found fossil of a bee was discovered encased in amber in Myanmar, and has been dated as being around 100 million years old. This bee is a bit more wasp-like than the bees we know today, and some scientists think that the bee evolved from wasps.

We can well imagine how happy early man was to find lovely sweet honey – but not so happy to encounter the sting in the tails! Ancient Egyptians are thought to be the first society to keep bees in hives – we’ve found evidence of this in beautiful hieroglyphs – and they also used beeswax in the embalming process.

Honey has been used as a sweetener and medicinally for 100 centuries and many civilisations have found ways to ferment it to make mead, a sweet-tasting alcohol.

In ancient Greek mythology, Zeus was fed with honey as a baby, and Apollo gave the gift of bees to Hermes. The Roman god of wine, Bacchus, was written to have discovered honey and to have given the lore of beekeeping to mor tals.

There have been bee brooches found in Minoan burial grounds in Crete, dating from over 2,000 years ago. The bee was the emblem of some of the most ancient kings of France, and Napoleon adopted it to signify what he considered his own rightful destiny as Emperor.

Manchester, in the UK, chose the worker bee as one of its motifs during the Industrial Revolution, and the symbol of the bee became one of hope and unity after the Manchester Arena bombing.