Posted on behalf of Haim Watzman

Charred honeybee remains found in the remains of a hive complex in the middle of a 3,000-year-old city in Israel belong to an Anatolian species and not the prevalent local species, Hebrew University entomologist Guy Bloch and his colleagues report in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi:10.1073/pnas.1003265107).

The discovery of the hive complex at Tel Rehov, a site in the Jordan River valley just south of Beit She’an where a large city thrived in the Iron Age (tenth and early ninth century BC) was reported over two years ago by excavation leader Amihai Mazar and his colleagues. While ancient texts and paintings indicate that beekeeping was practiced at this time in Egypt and the Near East, these were the first actual apiaries to be discovered.

Surprisingly, the hives were located in the middle of the city, rather than outside it — a venue in which the highly aggressive local Levantine subspecies, Apis mellifera syriaca, would have been a nuisance or worse.

Bloch and his colleagues isolated the well-preserved remains of 17 wings and several dozen legs preserved in a hard substance — apparently an amalgam of beeswax and sugars formed when the hives burned in a local conflagration.

“The wings and legs enabled us to compare morphology to a fairly large database of bee species and subspecies. The results were unambiguous — we were able to rule out all subspecies other than A. m. anatoliaca, presently found only in Anatolia,” Bloch explained.

Bloch concludes that either the range of A. m. anatoliaca extended farther southward during this period, or that ancient beekeepers deliberately imported queens of the calmer and higher-yielding foreign subspecies.

Image: Close-up of one of the ancient beehives found at Tel Rehov in Israel / Hebrew University, photo by Amihai Mazar.