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Ancient Honey Hunters: Cave Paintings and the 8,000-Year History of Beekeeping
- Pete Rizzo
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
The Story of Bees in Prehistoric Art
For thousands of years before humans domesticated bees, they risked their lives climbing cliff faces and navigating swarms to access one of nature's most precious resources: honey.
The story of this dangerous relationship, and its evolution into organized beekeeping, is preserved in cave paintings, rock art, and ancient carvings across the globe.
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The Honey Hunters of Prehistoric Spain
The Man of Bicorp: Humanity's Oldest Honey Portrait
In the Cuevas de la Araña (Spider Caves) near Valencia, Spain, approximately 8,000-year-old paintings depict what is considered the oldest known evidence of humans gathering honey.
The famous image, discovered in 1920 by a teacher named Jaime Poch, shows a figure scaling lianas or rope structures to reach a wild hive, surrounded by a swarm of bees rendered as exaggerated dots to emphasize the danger.
The figure carries a basket or container to collect honeycomb, illustrating that prehistoric Europeans were willing to risk their lives for this high-energy food source. The artistic choice to paint the bees larger than life wasn't merely decorative—it communicated the very real peril these early honey hunters faced.
Barranco Gómez: Technical Sophistication Revealed
Discovered in 2013 near Castellote in Teruel, Spain, the Barranco Gómez rock shelter contains a remarkably detailed 7,500-year-old honey gathering scene.
The painting shows a person with well-defined facial features climbing a rope ladder, with the ladder secured at the top near the beehive and stabilized mid-height by a pole anchored to the rock.
Researchers Manuel Bea, Inés Domingo, and Jorge Angás published their findings in 2021, describing it as the most elaborate and well-preserved honey hunting scene documented in Levantine art.
The 158 × 57 cm panel is unusual because it's painted on two planes of the rock face, both the wall and an overhead ceiling, using the rock's natural contours to enhance the scene's three-dimensional quality.
These Spanish paintings represent not art for art's sake, but documentation of vital survival activities. While other European populations were farming and growing grains during this period, the hunter-gatherers of eastern Spain relied on honey as their primary source of sweetness and high-energy nutrition.
The Spiritual Dimension: Southern African Rock Art
Zimbabwe's Matobo Hills and the Enigma of Formlings
In the Matobo Hills of Zimbabwe, San (Bushman) artists created a different kind of bee-related imagery. Among the thousands of rock art sites, researchers have identified distinctive motifs called "formlings", oval-shaped, segmented figures arranged vertically, sometimes interpreted as honeycombs or beehives.
For generations, archaeologists wrestled with the meaning of formlings without reaching consensus, but recent research drawing on 150 years of San ethnography suggests they represent flying termites and their underground nests.
Importantly, formlings are associated with bees and honey as supplementary metaphoric layers, since both termites and bees held profound spiritual significance as "honey-fat creatures" in San cosmology.
At Inanke Cave, formlings appear as yellow and orange rectangles topped with white cones and filled with dots, representing the spiritual potency (n/um) that rises during trance dances undertaken by the community.
Unlike the practical Spanish scenes, San rock art linked bees to spiritual energy harnessed by shamans during ritual ceremonies, making honey a substance of transformation rather than simply sustenance.
South Africa's Drakensberg Region
The Drakensberg-Maloti Mountains of South Africa and Lesotho contain the highest concentration of San rock art, with over 15,000 documented sites in South Africa alone.
While specific honey-gathering scenes are less common here than geometric and spiritual imagery, the broader tradition of depicting meaningful aspects of life, including valuable food resources, connects these sites to the wider southern African tradition.
India's Ancient Record: Bhimbetka Rock Shelters
The Bhimbetka rock shelters in central India's Madhya Pradesh contain over 700 rock shelters, with approximately 400 featuring prehistoric paintings dating from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods.
Among the diverse imagery, including hunting scenes, dancing, and animal figures, researchers have identified depictions of honey collection.
The Mesolithic period paintings at Bhimbetka commonly depict community activities including fruit gathering, honey collection, food preparation, and family scenes, rendered primarily in red and white pigments derived from hematite and limestone.
These paintings provide evidence that honey gathering was a communal activity in prehistoric India, potentially involving multiple figures working together to smoke out hives and defend against swarms.
The site exhibits continuous human occupation from the Stone Age through the 2nd century BCE, with some paintings dating to 10,000 BCE and artwork continuing into the medieval period, offering an unparalleled timeline of human cultural evolution.
The Egyptian Revolution: From Hunting to Husbandry
The Solar Temple of Niuserre: Organized Apiculture Begins
The earliest known depiction of organized beekeeping appears in the Solar Temple of Nyuserra (also spelled Niuserre) at Abu Gorab, dating to the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, approximately 2445-2421 BCE.
This represents a fundamental shift from the dangerous honey robbery depicted in Spanish caves to actual hive management.
The relief, originally located in the Chamber of Seasons and now in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, contains four scenes showing the complete beekeeping process: removing combs from hives, extraction, pressing, and sealing honey into storage vessels. Hieroglyphic inscriptions separating the scenes translate as "hymning, filling, pressing and sealing of honey".
The leftmost scene depicts a beekeeper kneeling before nine cylindrical hives stacked vertically, likely made of mud or clay, with one hand reaching for honey while the other holds what scholars initially thought might be cow dung for smoking the bees.
This marks the first historical documentation of using smoke to calm bees, a technique still fundamental to beekeeping today.
The Bee as Royal Symbol
From the First Dynasty onward, the bee was integral to Egyptian royal titles, with "Nesut-bity" meaning "the one of the Reed and the Bee," representing Upper and Lower Egypt respectively.
The bee hieroglyph specifically symbolized Lower Egypt, and legend held that bees were formed from the tears of the sun god Ra.
The bee's theological importance was reflected in architecture: during the 26th Dynasty (around 600 BCE), the temple of the goddess Neith at Sais was called "the house of the bee".
The Tomb of Pabasa: Late Period Sophistication
Pabasa, chief steward to the God's Wife of Amun Nitocris I during the reign of King Psamtik I (approximately 656-610 BCE), constructed an elaborate tomb (TT279) in the El-Assasif area of the Theban Necropolis.
The tomb contains beautifully detailed beekeeping reliefs showing cylindrical clay hives and the process of extracting and jarring honey, representing the culmination of Egyptian beekeeping artistry.
The scenes suggest that by this late period, beekeeping had acquired ritualistic or devotional components, with one relief possibly showing a beekeeper in prayer or reciting spells over his hives.
The precision with which bees were carved demonstrates both the importance of apiculture and the advanced artistic techniques of the period.
A Unique Australian Tradition: Beeswax as Medium
While most prehistoric bee-related art consists of paintings or carvings depicting bees or honey gathering, Aboriginal Australians developed a remarkable practice of using beeswax itself as an artistic medium.
Indigenous artists pressed beeswax obtained from native bee hives onto rock shelter walls to create various designs, including human figures, animals, and geometric patterns.
At sites like Djarrng in western Arnhem Land, researchers have documented human figures made by pressing beeswax onto rock walls, some of which have been directly radiocarbon dated.
Recent research at the Yilbilinji site in Limmen National Park, northern Australia, has revealed that Aboriginal artists may have heated and shaped beeswax to create miniature stencils for small-scale rock art, producing images too tiny to have been made using traditional hand-stenciling techniques.
This innovative use of beeswax represents a literal fusion of the insect and the art, the medium itself embodying the subject.
The Rarity of Petroglyphs
An important technical note: genuine bee petroglyphs (carvings into rock) are exceptionally rare compared to pictographs (paintings).
Most prehistoric bee art consists of paintings rather than carvings because bees are small creatures with delicate features that would be extremely difficult to carve into rough rock using stone tools. Painting allowed for the fine dots, lines, and details needed to represent swarms and individual insects.
The exception is Egypt, where the bee hieroglyph appeared carved in stone throughout the kingdom on thousands of temples, obelisks, and monuments as part of official royal inscriptions, but these were made with metal tools by skilled craftsmen of a literate civilization, not prehistoric hunter-gatherers with stone implements.
Evolution of the Human-Bee Relationship
The progression from prehistoric cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphs tells a broader story about human cultural evolution:
Paleolithic/Mesolithic Hunting (c. 10,000-8,000 BCE): Dangerous honey robbery from wild cliff hives, requiring sophisticated rope technology and considerable bravery. Honey represented high-energy nutrition worth risking one's life for.
Spiritual/Metaphorical Phase (timeframe varies): In cultures like the San of southern Africa, bees and honey became embedded in spiritual cosmology, representing potency, transformation, and connections to the spirit world.
Early Domestication (c. 2500 BCE): Egyptians pioneered organized beekeeping using horizontal cylindrical hives, smoke to calm bees, and systematic honey extraction and storage. Egyptian beekeepers used pipes made of clay and mud, approximately 1.2 meters long and 30-40 centimeters in diameter, which could be stacked to form walls of hives.
Symbolic Elevation (c. 3000 BCE - 600 BCE): The bee became a royal and religious symbol in Egypt, representing divine authority, organization, and the bounty of the gods.
Preservation and Significance
These ancient artworks face numerous threats. Many Matobo Hills paintings lack the detailed ethnographic records available for South African San art, making interpretation more challenging.
Climate change, human encroachment, and vandalism continue to endanger rock art sites worldwide.
Yet their importance cannot be overstated. These paintings provide irreplaceable insights into the social, economic, and spiritual lives of prehistoric peoples, showing their ingenuity, their relationship with the natural world, and the activities they deemed significant enough to immortalize.
From the precarious cliff faces of Mesolithic Spain to the systematized apiaries of Pharaonic Egypt, the journey of human-bee interactions reveals our ancestors' resourcefulness, spiritual complexity, and progressive mastery of the natural world.
Note: This article synthesizes archaeological and art historical research on prehistoric and ancient honey gathering and beekeeping imagery. While the Spanish, Egyptian, and Indian sites are extensively documented and dated, interpretations of San rock art symbolism remain subjects of ongoing academic discussion.
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