Beekeeping history can be traced as early as the rock age. Early rock paintings on cave walls in Africa and eastern Spain show people gathering honey from trees or rock crevices while bees fly around them. Cave drawings in Spain, near Valencia from around 7000 B.C. show figures climbing to out of reach places and gathering honey. Other cave images show figures surrounded by bees without being stung. Early honey gatherers probably learned by accident that smoke would calm bees as an offshoot of using fire for "warding-off" or driving other animals.

Beekeeping History proves to be a great tools for learning the art of bee keeping. There is evidence that man has long known that honey is a valuable food source. However, until man took the step to establish artificial hives, honey was only a rarely obtained "sweet reward".

Beekeeping history shows that Beekeeping originally may have developed following the observation that swarms will settle in any container with a dark interior space protected from the elements, similar to holes in trees or logs where bees are naturally found. Pottery vessels or straw containers provide the necessary shelter and protection for hive establishment.

It is also duly noted on a number of beekeeping history artifacts that Beekeeping is one of the oldest forms of food production. Some of the earliest evidence of beekeeping is from rock painting, dating to around 13,000 BC. It was particularly well developed in Egypt and was discussed by the Roman writers Virgil, Gaius Julius Hyginus, Varro and Columella. Traditionally beekeeping was done for the bees' honey harvest, although nowadays crop pollination service can often provide a greater part of a commercial beekeeper's income. Other hive products are pollen, royal jelly and propolis, which are also used for nutritional and medicinal purposes, and wax which is used in candlemaking, cosmetics, wood polish and for modelling. The modern use of hive products has not changed much.

For several thousand years of human beekeeping, human understanding of the biology and ecology of bees was very limited and riddled with superstition and folklore. Ancient observers thought that the queen bee was in fact a male, called "the king bee," and they had no understanding of how bees actually reproduced. It was not until the 18th century that European natural philosophers undertook the scientific study of bee colonies and began to understand the complex and hidden world of bee biology. Preeminent among these scientific pioneers were Swammerdam, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Charles Bonnet, and the blind Swiss scientist Francois Huber. Swammerdam and Réaumur were among the first to use a microscope and dissection to understand the internal biology of honey bees. Réaumur was among the first to construct a glass walled observation hive to better observe activities within hives. He observed queens laying eggs in open cells, but still had no idea of how a queen was fertilized; nobody had ever witnessed the mating of a queen and drone and many theories held that queens were "self-fertile," while others believed that a vapor or "miasma" emanating from the drones fertilized queens without direct physical contact. Huber was the first to prove by observation and experiment that queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the confines of hives, usually a great distance away.