>Beekeeping is pretty hip these days among urbanites (even NPR has rooftop bees). And bees play a vital role in modern agriculture. It turns out, farmers have been fostering a sweet relationship with these honey producers for at least 9,000 years, according to a study in the journal Nature. That's a couple of thousand years earlier than previously thought.
>The new date comes to us thanks to traces of beeswax found in bits of pottery recovered from well-dated Neolithic archaeological sites. The oldest potsherd was found at a Neolithic site called Ctalhoyuk in southern Anatolia in modern Turkey, which dates to the seventh millennium B.C. And it means that people established a working relationship with bees very soon after the rise of settled farming in the region.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/11/455333696/farmers-have-been-enjoying-the-fruits-of-bee-labor-for-9-000-years