This is long-saintiff-American 60 second science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?

You have bees to thank every time you drizzle some honey into your tea, and the human honeybee

relationship is long standing.

Iconography of honey bees adorns 4,400 year old walls in ancient Egypt.

Rock art has been found that depicts a stone age bee harvest, but exactly when early farmers began

to exploit bees has been unclear.

Those farmers exploited bees for more than honey.

Researchers shown that they also employed the beeswax for cosmetics, fuel, medicine, and to perform rituals.

Beazewx contains complex fats that leave a recognizable residue on pottery and other archaeological

artifacts, and scientists have now used that beeswax residue to analyze

what they've determined to be the earliest known human and bee association

dating back some 9,000 years. The researchers surveyed Europe the near east and northern Africa.

They found beeswax on pottery vessels from Neolithic farming sites in Anatolia

in or near modern day Turkey. They also discovered the first evidence of beeswax at Neolithic sites in northern Africa.

And the lack of wax residues in Ireland, Scotland and the Scandinavian Peninsula

led them to conclude that those locations were above what must have been a northern limit for honey bees.

The study is in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the beeswax residues at these human-occupied

sites may be clues pointing to the very beginnings of bee domestication,

with thousands of years of sweet results for us all.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Cynthia Graber.