The world’s oldest beehives: the apiary at Tel Rehov

Tel Rehov is a mound covering the remains of an ancient city in the Beth Shean Valley, in the northern part of the Jordan Valley. Since 1997 it has been excavated by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem team led by the archaeologist Amihai Mazar. In September 2007 the university announced a find that Mazar described as the earliest apiary yet revealed by excavation anywhere in the ancient Near East. The digging itself was directed by the archaeologist Nava Panitz-Cohen.

The hives stood not outside the walls but in the middle of a densely built-up quarter of the city. The excavators uncovered three rows containing more than thirty hives and at first estimated that the whole apiary had held about a hundred. A more detailed reconstruction published in 2022 allows for some sixty hives in the bottom tier, or roughly 180 across the three surviving tiers stacked one above another.

Cylinders of clay and straw

Each hive was a hollow cylinder of unfired clay mixed with straw, about 70–80 centimetres long and some 40 centimetres across. One end had a small hole for the bees; the other was closed with a removable clay lid through which the beekeeper took out the combs. The cylinders lay horizontally in rows, tier upon tier – much like the traditional clay hives still used in parts of the Near East.

The apiary was preserved by the disaster that destroyed it. A great fire swept through part of the city, baking the clay hives and burying them under debris. Radiocarbon dating of wheat grains found beside the hives places the apiary between the mid-10th and early 9th centuries BC, the period the Bible associates with the united monarchy and the early northern Kingdom of Israel.

Experts who visited the site estimated that the apiary could have yielded up to half a tonne of honey a year. Together with the wax, that is production on a scale the excavators describe as industrial – although the figure is an estimate based on traditional beekeeping, not a measurement.

Cult objects were found among the hives too: a four-horned clay altar decorated with figures of naked fertility goddesses, and an elaborately painted chalice. The researchers suggested they might be linked to local rites connected with honey and wax, but that remains only one possible interpretation.

Bees from Anatolia

The hives contained charred remains of workers, drones, pupae and larvae. According to a 2022 review, these are the only ancient bees ever found in the Near East. In 2010 a team led by the biologist Guy Bloch compared the vein pattern of their wings with today’s honeybee subspecies in a paper in PNAS. The bees did not match the local Syrian honeybee (Apis mellifera syriaca) but only the Anatolian honeybee (Apis mellifera anatoliaca), which now lives in Turkey.

The authors offer two explanations: either the Anatolian bee then ranged much further south, or the people of Rehov deliberately imported bees that were gentler and gave more honey than the local Syrian bee. The latter is known for its defensiveness and would have been a nuisance in the middle of a city. The researchers themselves point out that the conclusion rests on a small number of samples.

A land flowing with milk and honey

The Bible repeatedly calls the promised land “a land flowing with milk and honey”. Scholars long followed the Talmudic view that the Hebrew word devash here means chiefly a syrup made from dates or other fruit. Bees’ honey is mentioned explicitly in only two stories, both involving wild bees: Samson in the Book of Judges and Jonathan in the First Book of Samuel. The Tel Rehov find shows that bees were kept on a large scale in Israelite towns of the time, and Mazar therefore suggests the word may have covered both date honey and bees’ honey.

In Israel’s apiaries today the native Syrian bee has largely been replaced by the gentler and more productive Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera ligustica), now the most commonly kept bee in the country. Around five hundred Israeli beekeepers keep roughly a hundred thousand colonies. The switch was justified by the local bee’s defensiveness and the difficulty of handling it. The search for a calmer, more productive bee in this land has thus been going on for at least three thousand years.

The world’s oldest beehives: the apiary at Tel Rehov

Cylinders of clay and straw

Bees from Anatolia

A land flowing with milk and honey

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