A blog originally for keeping track of my hobby of being a Beekeeper which has evolved to include Home Brewing and even more recently to follow me and my families approach to "The Good Life". Eventually I hope to include baking recipes and stories of our flock of chickens also reporting on the success and failure at the allotments.

Wednesday 26 October 2011

Bee History: part 1

Rather than just talk about my experiences with Beekeeping, which I imagine could get a little boring and repetitive to all but the most involved, I would do a few posts on things like the history of Bees and mans involvement with them.

Bees are believed to have evolved from wasps millions of years ago. I have read that this happened because the wasps were feeding their larva with insects covered in pollen and they evolved to collect the pollen themselves.

One of the earliest preserved Bee samples was found encased in amber and is believed to be over 100 million years old. This would make them older than triceratops and tyrannosaurus. The Bee in question is not thought to be a social Bee like the Honey Bee, but rather a solitary Bee similar to the mason Bees of today. This sample was found in Burma.






As I would like to have several parts to this subject I will leave it there for now. When I have done a few I may put them all together in a separate page.

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