How Long Have People Harvested Honey?

Honey is a pantry staple. Whether poured over oatmeal or drizzled into tea, many keep a jar of it in the kitchen cabinet—and it’s a food that people have been eating for thousands of years.

According to the Honey Bee Research Centre at the University of Guelph in Canada, humans have been harvesting honey since prehistoric times. Before beekeepers kept apiaries, people hunted for honey and harvested honeycomb from beehives. 

“Honey was very important for all ancient civilizations,” says Luciana Carvalho, a postdoctoral archaeology research associate at the University of Oxford.

A cave painting in northeastern Spain depicting a human harvesting honey dates back 7,500 years to the Neolithic period, according to research published in 2021 in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria. Egyptian hieroglyphs illustrating honeybees date to around 3000 B.C. And, according to a 2022 paper in the journal Animals, the use of honeybees in the Nile Valley can be traced to the earliest years of the Egyptian kingdom. 

Among first known inscriptions detailing beekeeping dates to 2450 B.C., in Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini's sun temple from the fifth dynasty. Within the temple, a room holds four bas-relief scenes: a beekeeper and beehives, three men pouring honey into vessels, two men working with the honey and a beekeeper sealing the vessels.

Honey hasn’t just served as a food—it has also been applied as a medicine. In fact, its medicinal applications predate the formal study of medicine, with the earliest known records of its use tracing back to Sumer, an ancient civilization from around 5500 B.C. Its significance persisted over eons and across cultures. Both Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine have incorporated it, according to a 2018 paper published in the Journal of Apicultural Research. 

Honey was applied to wounds, as its natural antibacterial qualities help prevent infection, while its viscosity protects the wound and promotes healing. Sumerian medical texts mention honey in treatments for eye infections and ear conditions, sometimes combined with other ingredients like milk or plant extracts. And honey was taken orally for stomach issues and as a general tonic.

As humans developed beekeeping practices, they used hollow logs, clay pots and straw baskets as makeshift hives across Europe, Asia and Africa.

“We like to think of honey as being stored in ceramic jars because that is what we have found in Egyptian tombs,” Carvalho says, adding that in some cases early humans also stored honey in copper alloys like bronze.

In fact, in 1954, archaeologists discovered bronze containers in a subterranean shrine dedicated to an unknown deity while investigating a Greek settlement from the sixth century B.C. in what is now Paestum in southern Italy. These eight jars sealed with cork disks contained a sticky, pasty residue with a potent waxy smell. Researchers originally believed the contents were a viscous liquid, but later speculated they could have been beeswax or honey.

Carvalho and colleagues reinvestigated the jars’ contents and for the first time confirmed they contained 2,500-year-old honey. They published their findings in July 2025 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Using modern analytical methods, the authors found the residue on the jars included hexose sugars common to honey, as well as proteins from royal jelly, a milky substance secreted by honeybees to feed queen bees.

The finding confirms that Greeks were harvesting and storing honey 2,500 years ago. The fact that it was entombed in this shrine underscores the value that ancient Greeks placed on it, elevating it to a status worthy of offering to a deity. The authors point out that according to Greek mythology, the god Zeus was nourished with honey as a child. 

In the Mycenaean era of ancient Greece (1600–1100 B.C.), honey wasn’t reserved for any specific deity, according to 2020 research. But in the centuries that followed, it became linked to more unusual rites, especially those connected to the Underworld and the dead. The 2,500-year-old bronze jars likely belonged to this later tradition.

Connecting honey to the afterlife makes sense since it’s also believed that honey doesn’t expire. “Judging by what we found, you could eat it,” Carvalho says. Honey does, of course, undergo chemical changes, especially when bacteria interact with it, so, she adds, “we probably wouldn't be able to taste it so much.”