Honey hunting or honey harvesting is the gathering of honey from wild bee colonies and is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock painting, dating to around 8,000 BC.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, the gathering of honey from wild or semi-wild bee colonies was carried out on a commercial scale.Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the colony.As early as the Stone Age, people collected the honey of wild bees, but this was not done commercially. From the Early Middle Ages it became a trade, known in German-speaking central Europe, for example, as a Zeidler or Zeitler, whose job it was to collect the honey of wild, semi-wild or domestic bees in the forests. Unlike modern beekeepers, they did not keep the bees in man-made wooden beehives. Instead, they cut holes as hives in old trees at a height of about six meters and fitted a board over the entrance. Whether a colony of bees nested there or not depended entirely on the natural environment and that could change every year. The tree tops were also cut off in order to prevent wind damage.
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