As a beekeeper in real life, I think it would be neat to see the domestication of honeybees a source of both honey and wax. Just my two-cents though.
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Sounds good, we will see if this fits in Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures or this is only eventual honey gathering.
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Bees are definitely a Neolithic and Mesolithic resource, but I don’t know of any evidence for bee keeping. There are pictures in ancient Egypt (thousands of years later) showing small fires being burned to allow bee keepers to harvest honey, but I doubt any such evidence would survive from the Neolithic.
I use bee wax in a lot of my Neolithic reproductions lol
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From what I saw Bee keeping started in egypt around 4500 years ago
Well, that may be the first good evidence, but it may very well have begun before this.
If I recall, Old Kingdom Egypt had depictions of bee keeping, which is about ~4500 years ago (is that was your are referring to?). I wonder if this could have come from the earlier early or predynasic periods.
Also, it becomes difficult to be sure as the only major tool you would find would be storage vessels and they would exist both with wild honey and cultivated honey.
Evidence for wild honey gathering dates back quite a bit.
Here’s a depiction from the Cuevas de la Araña, near present day Valencia Spain.
So, prehistoric folk from the region were at least gathering it 5500 years before the Egyptian example (~6000BCE)
img: GPL Utilisateur:Achillea — Wikipédia
From what I found that was first domestication of bees and they were harvesting honey much earlier
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The first know of, though it may have occurred before as well. Of course we need to operate on what we know and not what we suspect lol
Honey-gathering would be good (plenty of danger, and need of planning), and bee-keeping would come later.
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The bjtj Bee hieroglyph was the symbol of the kings of lower Egypt at least from the early Old Kingdom on, so it undoubtedly played a large role in that part of the country by that time already.
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