For Thousands Of Years, Humans Have Minded Their Own Beeswax

Times Gazette

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For Thousands Of Years, Humans Have Minded Their Own Beeswax

Science

Nov 13, 2015

For how long have individuals been manipulating the job of honeybees? More than 8,500 years, according to a new study.
Researchers found beeswax residue on fragments of early cooking pots from archeological sites across the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. Their findings were released in the journal Nature.
“Individuals have been dwelling with honeybees for quite a long time and they’ve been exploiting them,” study lead author Melanie Roffet-Salque tells The Christian Science Monitor in an interview.
Yet, beeswax might have been used in its own right for various technological, rite, cosmetic, and medicinal purposes, for instance, to waterproof porous ceramic containers,” Dr. Roffet Salque said in a press release.
The researchers aren’t certain how ancient peoples got to the bees’ products, but Roffet-Salque has a couple notions.
In that scenario, folks would have found the bees’ natural hives in nooks like hollowed out trees.
But it wouldn’t be that far fetched to imply people learned to make their own log hives that are straightforward too, Roffet Salque says. They might have gotten a hollow log, put the bees in it and covered it with a slate, she clarifies.
In any case, the folks might have harvested the honeycomb and pressed it in their hands to push the honey out and leave the wax. People wouldn’t have needed to be very technologically advanced, Roffet-Salque says.
Were these humans even using the honey?
“The do not have evidence for honey,” says Roffet Salque. “We can not discover the honey because it’s full of sugars, so it’s very soluble and it doesn’t survive archeological times” if it gets wet.
“What researchers discover is the beeswax as it is got very characteristic compounds that are very resistant to degradation.”
But Roffet Salque believes people were using both beeswax and honey. It does not make sense to not use both, she says. “Should you go into all the problem in receiving honey, then you might as well use the beeswax,” and vice versa.
“The dearth of a fossil record of the honeybee means it is ecologically undetectable for the majority of the past 10,000 years.
Dr. Evershed goes on to say that the chemical evidence is “unequivocal.” Additionally, until said, “It reveals prevalent exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee organization to considerably earlier dates.”
Although this study finds prevalent utilization of honeybees, the researchers found a surprising lack of beeswax at northern archeological sites. Above the 57th parallel North latitudinal line, Roffet Salque and coworkers found no beeswax.
“We have examined plenty of sherds from those places,” Roffet Salque says. “And we are finding plenty of animal fats, but we have not located any beeswax.”
This no-bee zone stretches across regions like Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and modern day Scotland too.
“It probably means that bees were absent in the time, so folks couldn’t get the beeswax and honey,” Roffet Salque says. “We believe we have seen the environmental limit of where bees were residing at the time.”
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