"For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature, teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom"
- William Shakespeare

Bees have been dated as far back as 120 million years ago, stemming from the Cenozoic era. Preservations from bees come from yellow, crystallized tree resin, and the earliest breed of these wasps were called the "Pemphredonine wasp".

"The honeybee ... capable of being tamed or domesticated to a most surprising degree."
- Lorenzo L. Langstroth .. Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee

The earliest record of human interaction with bees dates all the way back to 13,000-8,000 BCE, where we first started to go "honey-hunting" in beehives as a source of nutrients. It is suspected that honeybees were one of the first animals that were soon to be domesticated. Many people around 10,000 years ago used honey as part of pottery and sculpting, as well as consuming it for nutrients and other purposes.
Below is the earliest recorded imagery of bees with humans.

"Those bees, which chose thy sweet mouth for their hive, to gather honey from thy works, survive."
- Thomas Pecke, Parnassi Puerperium, 1659

Bees were first transported to the United States in Connecticut, 1644. Many hives were kept in secure wooden boxes, where they could not be easily taken out and placed elsewhere, as colonizers of America most commonly used them for supplying their family with nutrients, food, and selling them off for money in the 1600's. Many beekeepers had difficulty maintaining bees in their farms, and a common method for keeping a steady bee count was to capture hives in the fall, and burn the trees the hives were on.
Below is an image of the boxes that they stored bees in.

"If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live."
- Albert Einstein

However, the honey bees did not continue to thrive with humans for long. In the early 1990's-200's, scientists discovered a type of parasite that continued to kill off the bee population without warning, called the Varroa mite. Many Beekeepers reported that 21% of their bee populations had died to these mites, or the diseases transmitted from these mites.

"One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees..."
- Leo Tolstoy

Scientists' first attempt to strip these mites away from the bees were to use plastic chemical strips that killed them off quickly, but would do no harm to the bees themselves. Nowadays, these mites have gone away and bees have a higher resistance towards the Varroa mites due to scientists' experimentation, but there are several problems that scientists cannot solve quickly with bees, including a strange phenomenon called the "colony collapse disorder", in which bees will suddenly pass away rapidly in one hive, as well as the queen bee shortly after.

"A bee is never as busy as it seems; it's just that it can't buzz any slower"
- Kin Hubbard

It is estimated that bees fall victim to the Varroa mites in around summer or fall. Beekeepers at home have discovered several ways to deal with them at home, however, with DIY methods such as the "sugar shake method, sticky board method, and the alcohol wash method".

"If bees only gathered nectar from perfect flowers, they wouldn't be able to make even a single drop of honey."
- Matshona Dhliwayo

After the wave of Varroa mites, bees are now faced with a bigger problem- one more modern. The use of pesticides that started from early 2010's on many people's yards spread to local beehives, which slowly kills off the bees due to their little resistance against these toxic chemicals. Many people today are still unaware of how harmful these pesticides can be, and continue to deplete the bee population severely each year.

"To be successful, one has to be one of three bees: the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in."
- Suzy Kassem

Many people at home have decided to figure out how to stop the spread of pesticides in their local neighborhoods or their towns, as well as spreading information on the internet on how to limit use of pesticide, and help keep the population of bees stable. Many methods include to avoid spraying pesticide on blooming flowers, limiting where and how much product is sprayed, and reading the labels on how harmful certain pesticides are.

"Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope."
- Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Scientists attempted to counter the use of pesticides, since they could not limit what the people were buying and what they were spraying in their own property, and created certain flowers and planted them around the city, that could potentially attract more bees and allow for more pollination and growth. These experiments worked, and many people also decided to help with the bee population, as they planted several blooming flowers in their gardens.