Happy Saturday. Since we got a little bit about beekeeping in this week's installment of Unearthed, we're revisiting our episode on the history of beekeeping today. This episode traces the history of beekeeping up through the development of the Langstroth hive in the nineteenth century. But to be clear, the beekeeping and bee hunting methods that we talk about in the earlier parts of the episode are still practiced today all around the world. This episode originally came out on May eleventh, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I'm fond of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know if I've mentioned that on the show before. I don't know. I spent way too much time, Yes, Dad ushering a bee out of my garage so I could close the door. So this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the theme of wanting to do some episodes that feel like they are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of the world. I really like bees and beekeeping as you might think of it today. With square hives and the beekeeper in the white suit with a big veiled hat. I mean, that's a relatively recent invention, but beekeeping has a practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee species that store at least some honey in their nests, and almost without exception, people who have lived near these bees have developed methods to keep them and manage them, either in their nests out in the wild, or in hives that are made for that purpose. So this is really a global story. It's one that has lots of pieces that overlap and lots of different methods being practiced at the same time. So, for example, if you're listening to the episode and we're talking about methods of tracking wild bees that are about two thousand years old, and you're thinking, but wait, weren't people keeping bees in hives by that point. We will get to that part two. Also, we're using the past tense for a lot of this episode because we're talking about techniques and practices that started way in the past. But in a lot of cases, these same things, including hunting bees and keeping bees out in the wild, like they're all, they're still practice today. They did not go away. So most of humanity's beekeeping efforts have involved social bees that store honey in their nests. Today that tends to be one of various subspecies of the western or European honeybee or APIs melifera, but there are lots of other bees that also store honey, and they are part of beekeeping history too. The giant honeybee or APIs dorsata, is native to southern and Southeast Asia. Most tropical regions of the world have their own native species of stingless bees. That name is something of a misnomer. Most stingless bees do have stingers, but those stingers are smaller and they don't usually have structures for injecting venom. Other bees, including bumble bees, also store some honey, but in much smaller amounts, and there are also honey storing insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants. People have harvested and used the honey and other resources that all of these insects produce and store in their nests, and in some cases they've kept these insects in one way or another, But for the most part, today we are focusing on honeybees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees, which have historically made up just the vast majority of bee keeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the eddyizard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney? Bees have been on earth for longer than humans have. Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least least one hundred million years ago during their Cretaceous period, so did insects that fed from the pollen and nectar found in those flowers. The oldest fossilized bee honey is about fifty million years old. Of course, there is no written record of this, but based on the behavior of other primates, it is incredibly likely that our earliest ancestors found and raided these nests as soon as they realized that they were there. So yeah, it's it's not a far logical leap that basically as soon as hominids were like there is something sweet and delicious over there, that they would have figured out how a way to get at it, and then the brood, like the immature bees that are in the honeycomb, like they're a source of protein. There's a lot of stuff you can get out of nests that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history. Our first documentation of humans interaction with bees goes back to rock and cave art from the Mesolithic period, and that period started about twenty thousand years ago. This artwork exists in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and it shows people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary based on what kind of bees lived in a particular area and what people did to hunt them and harvest their nests. For example, in places where bees nest in cavities, figures are shown on ladders next to holes surrounded by flying insects, while others in the scene are holding things like buckets or what may be smokers to pacify or drive away those insects. In places where giant honey bees nest out in the open, people are climbing ladders or scaling cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also a painting at the Chatakuk Archaeological site in what is now Turkey that dates back to about sixty six hundred BCE which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside the cells that suggests that the people who made the art have a lot of first hand familiarity with bees and their nests. There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing bee's importance to other animals. One rock painting in eastern Spain shows what appears to be an animal's paw reaching toward a hole that has flying insects around it, so that's most likely a bear trying to get it a nest of honey. And we have evidence of some of the things that people made using what they harvested from bees nests. For example, archaeologists have dated artifacts made using the lost wax process to about thirty five hundred BCE. These artifacts, which were made in the region around the Dead Sea, were made by creating a model out of beeswax and then making a cast of that model using sand or clay. The wax would burn away or be lost, which is where it gets its name when the mold was fired, and then molten metal would be poured into the space in the mold. Humanity's first honey and bee hunts were probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a nest of bees somewhere and rate it, probably without a lot of protection from stings or, in the case of stingless bees, from things like bites or irritating substances that they carry on their legs. Early opportunistic bee hunts probably also didn't do a lot to protect the bee colony that was being rated. People would carry away everything that they could from the nest, and when the human population was pretty small and bee colonies were really abundant, there still would have been lots of unaffected colonies so that the bees themselves survived as a species. As soon as societies developed the concept of personal property and laws related to that property, there were also laws about who owned bees. These laws included things like the ownership of nests on a person's property, the ownership of swarms that hadn't yet found a new nesting site, how nests had to be marked to show who owned them, and punishments and restitution to be paid if someone harmed someone else's bees or nests. And of course, on a more general note, there are references to bees, bees, wax, and honey all over literature all over the world, going back to the earliest uses of written language. Over time, opportunistic bee hunting and just sort of taking advantage of bees that were already there evolved into a more intentional process, with people methodically looking for bees and their nests instead of basically harvesting nests as they happened to find them, and this essentially happened everywhere on Earth that had both people and honey storing bees, with the only exceptions being in places that developed religious prohibitions against harming insects or depriving them of their honey or their brood. The exact steps involved in hunting bees depended on what kind of bees lived in a particular area, but in general, people started by watching for bees, either at water sources or near flowers. In about the year fifty CE, Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella described it this way quote, First we must try to discover how far away they are, and for this purpose liquid red ochre must be prepared. Then, after touching the backs of the bees with stocks smeared with this liquid, as they are drinking at the spring waiting in the same place, you will be able to more easily recognize the bees when they return. If they are not slow in returning, you know that they dwell in the neighborhood. But if they are late In doing so, you will calculate the distance by the period of their delay. So bees obviously are small they move fast, so it can be hard to track a bee, even for an experienced bee hunter. So people also figured out ways to make it easier to follow a bee back to the nest. In some cultures, people have physically attached something to the bees to make them more visible, like a very fine thread, or a piece of grass or a little bit of paper. This idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man, how challenging it must be to just attack something to a bee while it's drinking some water. This would both make the bee easier to see by basically sticking a little flag on it, and then also slow the bee down as it tried to carry this extra weight while it flew back to the nest. People also figured out ways to take advantage of the fact that bees generally fly in a straight line when going back to their nest, So if you collect several bees in a portable box or trap, you can let them out one at a time, following each bee until you lose sight of it. Kalumela has more detail about how this was done in the Roman Empire writing quote, the joint of a reed with the knots at either end, is cut, and a hole bored in the side of the rod thus formed, through which you should drop a little honey or boiled down must. The rod is then placed near a spring. Then when a number of bees attracted by the smell of the sweet liquid have crept into it, the rod is taken away and the thumb placed on the whole, and one bee only released at a time, which, when it has escaped, shows the line of its flight to the observer, and he, as long as he can keep up, follows it as it flies away. Then when he can no longer see the bee, he lets out another, and if it seeks the same quarter of the heavens, he persists in following his former tracks. Otherwise, he opens the hole and allows them to emerge one after another, and marks the direction in which most of them fly home, and pursues them until he is led to the lurking place of the swarm. Kalamela describes using a piece of reed for making this bee tracking trap, but other cultures have used this same basic process, making their traps out of other materials, including antlers, horns, and crafted boxes made of something like wood or metal that were created specifically for that purpose. Historically, people have also observed other animals to figure out where bees might be nesting, particularly animals like bears and honey badgers, which are also known to be fond of honey, and in parts of tropical Appa and Asia, there is also the honeyguide bird. These are birds that are fond of eating beeswax, and bee larvae, but can't easily get into the nest without help, so after finding a nest, the honeyguide will try to attract the attention of a mammal like a badger or even a person. For at least five hundred years, people in some parts of Africa, including Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey guides know that they are ready to go on a hunt. And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place to place. That's a relationship between honeyguide birds and people. Delights me. Oh same, It's so cool just in general. The fact that the bird was like, I want to get in this nest. I can't by myself. I'm gonna flap my wings around and make noise attention of something bigger. So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen to find to intentionally searching for them, they also move from just harvesting the nests when they found them to ten those nests in the wild. People have done things like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter, keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the bees were nesting to make more room, or hollowing out similar cavities nearby with the hope of attracting a swarm. People have also improved wild nests to make it easier to access their contents, things like adding little doors into a tree that a person could reach into and then close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders to reach nests that are in high places. Eventually, people also started building structures specifically with the hope of attracting bees, including in places where the bees couldn't have survived otherwise, like, for example, building thick walled cavities at oases in the Sahara Desert with the hope of sustaining bee colonies inside the walls. That gets a little closer to the way most people think of bee keeping today with purpose built enclosures to house bees in a specific location, and we'll get more into that after a sponsor break. In a very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in hives for a really long time, overlapping all that bee hunting that we just talked about earlier. This possibly goes back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture. A paper published in the journal Nature in twenty sixteen describes bees wax lipid residues that were found in Neolithic pottery samples from Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa, and these findings suggest that the pots might have been used as hives, although it's also possible that they were used to store wax that people had harvested out in the wild. We do know that people were keeping bees in hives in the Nile Delta by about five thousand bees An ancient Egyptian art is full of depictions of bees and hives and beekeeping. One relief dating back to the Fifth Dynasty, which started around twenty four to sixty five BCE, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary, suggesting that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at that point. Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian mythology as being transformed from the tears of the god Raw after they fell to earth. The first written depiction of a beehive in China dates back to about three hundred BCE, although the first Chinese references to honey as medicine are ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people started keeping stingless bees in hives made out of calabash gourds somewhere between three hundred BCE and three hundred cees, so in a lot of different parts of the world this goes back for thousands of years. These first bee hives tended to be pretty simple. Most were horizontally oriented cylinders with a small opening at one end that was big enough for bees to pass through most of the time, but not always. The other end had some kind of removable covering to allow people to harvest from the hive, sometimes after using smoke to drive the bees away from that end of the hive first. In some regions, these hives were like a long, narrow pot placed on its side, with a removable covering at one end that had a hole in the middle for the bees to pass through. Around the world, these horizontal hives were made using a variety of materials. Hollow logs, including logs that had been cut from trees with the bees already inside and then taken somewhere else, straw or grass mats rolled into a cylinder and then covered with mud or clay pottery. Sometimes people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow lines that were cut into the surface, both to give the bees a roughened anchor point when they started to build their honeycombs, and also to encourage them to build those combs in a particular direction. Other hive designs followed from these basic horizontal cylinders. Some were similar to the ones we just described, but rectangular rather than cylindrical. Others were vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees that are native to parts of Asia don't nest in enclosed spaces, so in that part of the world people attach slanted boards to trees as anchor points for honeycombs. These are known as rafters because of their resemblance to the rafters in the roof of a house, and it is not just a matter of sticking them to a tree. Beekeepers have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage, and more when selecting the exact right spot to hang a rafter. In some places, particularly in Western Europe, people have also kept bees in skeps that are woven from things like straw or wicker. These look pretty much like upside down baskets, with the open mouth resting on a flat surface and a small opening on the side that acts as a doorway for the bees. Especially in places where the weather was cool and damp, like for example, in England, steps were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the time a skeep is harvest by lifting it up off of that flat surface that it rests on and then removing the contents from underneath, but some steps also have sort of a hinged lid up at the top. In many cases, harvesting these fixed comb hives involved killing the bee colony inside. In some cases, as many bees as possible were shaken or drummed into another hive first, but a lot of the time the loss of the hive was just considered part of the process. People captured swarms of bees in the springtime, tended the hive for a season, and then harvested them before winter, starting that whole process over again the following spring, or a beekeeper might leave the hives that seemed most likely to survive the winter unharvested, with the hope that they would swarm and fill empty hives in the spring. So this was one of the reasons why people started trying to figure out ways to make bee hives that had removable colmbs to try to preserve more of the bee colonies. If you could easily remove just some sections of honeycomb without damaging the others or the hive itself, that could preserve the colony. Also, at least in theory, such a harvesting method might also be easier and cause less agitation for the bees, maybe leading to fewer stings on the beekeeper. The first hives with removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top, with a series of slats or bars placed over the opening instead of one solid lid. People had figured out that if you left some space between each slat, the bees would build separate combs, one per slat, and then you could remove a slat from the hive, taking it in the attached comb out of the hive, while leaving the rest of the combs untouched. One of the first written records of a hive like this came from French doctor Jacob Spon and English botan George Wheeler. They were traveling together and saw them in use in Attica, Greece in sixteen seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar systems also developed, apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time people started developing hives with removable combs, they had also started developing beekeeping garments that were meant to minimize stings. For much of beekeeping history, people didn't really have specific bee keeping attire in places where the bees were stingless or very gentle. It wasn't really needed in tropical regions where people didn't wear as much clothing, Sometimes they removed what they did wear to keep bees from being trapped in that fabric. In other places, people may have done sturdy clothing with long sleeves and gloves, but it really wasn't much different from what they would wear for other work. By about the fourteen hundreds, though, people in Europe had started making garments specifically for working with bees, which were intended to minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details depended somewhat on what was already fashionable in a particular place. In France, for example, the first purpose made beekeeping garments were hoods that covered the face with an insert that was made of a mesh of horsehair or wire or some other material that would offer some protection but also offer at least some visibility. Was because hoods were a little more common in terms of fashion in England, where brimmed hats were in fashion. The first beekeeping hoods were large hats with veils attached around that brim, and eventually the standard outfit also evolved to include a blouse. In seventeen ninety six, bee master John Keyes published a book called The Antient Bee Master's Farewell or Full and Plane Directions for the Management of Bees to the greatest Advantage, disclosing further improvements of the hives, boxes, and other instruments to facilitate the operations, especially that of separating double and trouble hives or boxes. Also brief remarks on Shirach and other distinguished apiators on the continent. Deduced from a series of experiments during thirty years. Oh how I love a long title. HU. It has a chapter on bee dress in which Keys advises making a hood by attaching bolting cloth to the brim of an old hat, with the brim cut down to two inches all the way around and the cloth hanging a foot in the areas around the nose, chin, and neck reinforced with oiled linen. He also recommends leather gloves, old stockings over the extremities, and an apron. If you're not familiar with bolting cloth, it's like a pretty sturdy cloth that was woven to allow for things like sifting with it. Keys also concludes this chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with bees without this bee dress, nor than without the addition of a man's coat. And I almost said breeches. Also, I don't want it tell you to dress like a man, but it might be in your best interest, but I'm not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like I almost said breaching, almost, but maybe not. Keith's book was just on the cusp of beekeeping as most people might recognize it today, and we're going to get into that after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Starting in about the seventeenth century, a couple of things happened in tandem that radically changed beekeeping pretty much around the world. One was that colonists started introducing European or Western honeybees into other parts of the world to which they were not native. This started with the first successful introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in sixteen seventeen, with those bees kept cool during the voyage across the Atlantic to try to keep them in a way intertime state of dormancy during the trip. The colonial introduction of the European honeybee into other parts of the world continued for more than two hundred years, and a lot of places European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of bees pretty much moving ahead of the colonists. The other was a shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with European honeybees. Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was a huge focus on the idea of scientific beekeeping, especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists, and others all wanted to improve the practice of beekeeping based on scientific principles, ideally in a way that allowed beekeepers to harvest from hives without killing the bees. During this process, beekeeping was being informed by new scientific discoveries about bees, and science was making new discoveries about bees thanks to beekeeping. One development that was part of this was the observation high, in other words, a hive with transparent walls that allowed people to see the bees and their work inside. And his fourteenth century work Life of Animals, al Damiri described an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle. Wrote that the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing into their business that they covered over the glass with clay. Aristotle lived in the fourth century BCE, and this fourteenth century reference seems to be the first account of him having a hive like this, so that's probably not accurate that he really did have one, but it does mean that by the time al Damiri was writing, at least the idea of an observation hive existed. I love the idea of bees building a privacy wall, though, yea. By the seventeenth century there were definitely observation hives out in the world, thanks in part to earlier developments in glassmaking. In sixteen fifty four, doctor John Wilkins gave an observation high to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented it with a diagram. A year later. On May fifth, sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive quote after dinner to mister Evelyn's he being abroad, we walked in his garden, and a lovely noble ground he hath indeed, and among other rarities, a hive of bees. So as being hived in glass, you may see the bees making their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree with Samuel Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch the bees through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm in a science museum, I get super excited when there is a glass bee enclosure. I think it's oddly soothing. There's something about it that just puts the brain at rest. Transparent hives let people get a much closer and more accurate look at a lot of day to day life of bees, including their anatomy and their reproduction. In the eighteenth century, for example, French inventor Renee and Juan Fechol del Remuer used transparent hives to do some really groundbreaking work about bee reproduction and the way that bees used their bodies to regulate the hive's temperature. In the late eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist and naturalist Francois huber took this bee observation one step forward with what he called a leaf hive. This was a beehive shaped almost like a book, with each comb in its own wooden frame and the frames on hinges so that you could move from one page to the next. Hubert used this hive in his extensive study of bees, which he undertook with the help of his wife, his son, and his assistant Francois Bernan, who helped record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This leaf hive was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it was certainly not practical for everyday beekeeping. But it was developed in the middle of a two hundred year effort to create a practical, affordable, modular bee hive for European honeybees that would allow easy removal and extraction of the honeycombs with as little disruption to the lives of the bees as possible. And there were a lot of different people who put in the work on this between the sixteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds. Most of them were in England, France, and other parts of Western Europe. As we noted earlier, there were a whole lot of bees in the Americans with this introduction of bees through colonialism, but American bee keepers weren't really involved in this until the eighteen hundreds because before that point there was just so much forage available for bees. It was very easy to keep bees. In a lot of parts of North America, they had been more focused on controlling wax moths that could really destroy the hives. The person who is typically credited for developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstross, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied and built on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstross based a lot of his work on a high developed by August Munn in eighteen thirty four, which used hanging frames with space between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth was also inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed that the frames could be moved without angering the bees too badly, and Langstrot's view the ideal hive had a lot of requirements It had to allow the beekeeper to perform every necessary function of beekeeping, including the collecting honey, without killing or injuring any bees. The beekeeper had to be able to remove combs from the hive without angering the bees or damaging the combs. The hive had to protect the bees from the elements with adequate ventilation and a removable bottom to allow for the removal of dead bees or other debris. The hive had to allow the bees to build and just to live without being required to do any extra work. And it also had to accommodate colonies of different sizes. And all of the parts of this hive that he had in mind needed to be interchangeable, so that a beekeeper could use the same parts with different hives as needed. And then, on top of all that and assorted other details, Langstroth's ideal hive needed to be combined into one cheap, simple form. Langstroth introduced his hive in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging frames with a one centimeter gap between each frame and between the edge of the frame and the interior of the hive itself. This amount of space is also described as somewhere between a quarter and three eighths of an inch. Langstroth called this small gap the bee space. Bees needed to move around the hive, but they won't build their combes in the space. The hives frames hung in a durable box of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Burkham. The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient for beekeepers to check on their beeves and to harvest their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two, and he published a book about it and about beekeeping in eighteen fifty three. The Langstroth hive and similar hives that were patterned after it, made bee keeping a lot more accessible with a much larger possible honey yield, although getting started with one did require some initial investment. It also became a lot easier for people to use Western honeybees as crop pollinators. At the same time, though, it became much easier for diseases and mites to spread through densely populated apiaries. When colony collapse disorders started making headlines in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, people wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honeybees was part of the problem. The spread of European honeybees also led to more competition with native bees for forage. There is some conflicting data about this today. Whether domesticated European honeybees are harmful to native bees can depend on the conditions in a particular area, like exactly how many domesticated bees there are, how much forage is available, and exactly what kind of forage it is. Another result of the introduction of the Langstroth hive and the surge of beekeeping that followed was an expansion of beekeeping as a field. People started forming beekeeping associations, they established beekeeping journals and other periodicals, and they started beekeeping guilds. This was a lot different from previous eras when most people who wrote about bees were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists, rather than people who were specializing just in bees and beekeeping. Although the Langstroth hive has become standard beekeeping equipment in many parts of the world, beekeeping continues to develop. This episode has been about social bees that store honey, but starting in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States and Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting bees to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments have been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural worker Warwick Estevam Kerr and others were looking for a breed of bee that might be better suited to the American tropics than European honeybees were. They imported almost fifty bee queens from Africa, which he helped to breed with European honeybee drones. Their goal was to try to create a breed that had a more docile temperament like European bees do, but was more physically adapted to life in the tropical climate like African bees. The details are not entirely clear, but in nineteen fifty seven, the queen excluders were removed from the hives that Kerr was using, something that may have been accidental, or it may have been someone trying to be helpful. Several of the hives swarmed and the bees escaped into the surrounding forests. This was the origin of what came to be known as Africanized honeybees, which tend to be more aggressive and territorial than their Western counterpart. They have since spread northward and southward through most of South America, through Central America, and into the southwestern and southern United States. There are so many other things that we could have discussed in this episode, like b mythology and religious symbolism, and how the scientific understanding of bee society evolved, and how mail order package bees came to be and other modern beehive designs, and various writers through history who thought the queen bee was really a king, and how gender roles have varied among beekeepers across global societies. Really, somebody could have a whole entire podcast that was only about beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you want a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were doing what a different types of hives and all of that, try to get your hands on a copy of the World History of Beekeeping and honey Hunting. Your most likely source to find it is in a university library. It is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred pages long, and because it's a textbook, the writing is very spare in its style. Those are seven hundred plus pages of detail about bees without a lot of extraneous side. So that's our brief history of beekeeping. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcas casts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Since we got a little bit about beekeeping in this week's installment of Unearthed, we're revisiting our episode on the history of beekeeping today. This episode traces the history of beekeeping up through the development of the Langstroth hive in the nineteenth century. But to be clear, the beekeeping and bee hunting methods that we talk about in the earlier parts of the episode are still practiced today all around the world. This episode originally came out on May eleventh, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I'm fond of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know if I've mentioned that on the show before. I don't know. I spent way too much time, Yes, Dad ushering a bee out of my garage so I could close the door. So this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the theme of wanting to do some episodes that feel like they are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of the world. I really like bees and beekeeping as you might think of it today. With square hives and the beekeeper in the white suit with a big veiled hat. I mean, that's a relatively recent invention, but beekeeping has a practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee species that store at least some honey in their nests, and almost without exception, people who have lived near these bees have developed methods to keep them and manage them, either in their nests out in the wild, or in hives that are made for that purpose. So this is really a global story. It's one that has lots of pieces that overlap and lots of different methods being practiced at the same time. So, for example, if you're listening to the episode and we're talking about methods of tracking wild bees that are about two thousand years old, and you're thinking, but wait, weren't people keeping bees in hives by that point. We will get to that part two. Also, we're using the past tense for a lot of this episode because we're talking about techniques and practices that started way in the past. But in a lot of cases, these same things, including hunting bees and keeping bees out in the wild, like they're all, they're still practice today. They did not go away. So most of humanity's beekeeping efforts have involved social bees that store honey in their nests. Today that tends to be one of various subspecies of the western or European honeybee or APIs melifera, but there are lots of other bees that also store honey, and they are part of beekeeping history too. The giant honeybee or APIs dorsata, is native to southern and Southeast Asia. Most tropical regions of the world have their own native species of stingless bees. That name is something of a misnomer. Most stingless bees do have stingers, but those stingers are smaller and they don't usually have structures for injecting venom. Other bees, including bumble bees, also store some honey, but in much smaller amounts, and there are also honey storing insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants. People have harvested and used the honey and other resources that all of these insects produce and store in their nests, and in some cases they've kept these insects in one way or another, But for the most part, today we are focusing on honeybees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees, which have historically made up just the vast majority of bee keeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the eddyizard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney? Bees have been on earth for longer than humans have. Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least least one hundred million years ago during their Cretaceous period, so did insects that fed from the pollen and nectar found in those flowers. The oldest fossilized bee honey is about fifty million years old. Of course, there is no written record of this, but based on the behavior of other primates, it is incredibly likely that our earliest ancestors found and raided these nests as soon as they realized that they were there. So yeah, it's it's not a far logical leap that basically as soon as hominids were like there is something sweet and delicious over there, that they would have figured out how a way to get at it, and then the brood, like the immature bees that are in the honeycomb, like they're a source of protein. There's a lot of stuff you can get out of nests that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history. Our first documentation of humans interaction with bees goes back to rock and cave art from the Mesolithic period, and that period started about twenty thousand years ago. This artwork exists in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and it shows people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary based on what kind of bees lived in a particular area and what people did to hunt them and harvest their nests. For example, in places where bees nest in cavities, figures are shown on ladders next to holes surrounded by flying insects, while others in the scene are holding things like buckets or what may be smokers to pacify or drive away those insects. In places where giant honey bees nest out in the open, people are climbing ladders or scaling cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also a painting at the Chatakuk Archaeological site in what is now Turkey that dates back to about sixty six hundred BCE which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside the cells that suggests that the people who made the art have a lot of first hand familiarity with bees and their nests. There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing bee's importance to other animals. One rock painting in eastern Spain shows what appears to be an animal's paw reaching toward a hole that has flying insects around it, so that's most likely a bear trying to get it a nest of honey. And we have evidence of some of the things that people made using what they harvested from bees nests. For example, archaeologists have dated artifacts made using the lost wax process to about thirty five hundred BCE. These artifacts, which were made in the region around the Dead Sea, were made by creating a model out of beeswax and then making a cast of that model using sand or clay. The wax would burn away or be lost, which is where it gets its name when the mold was fired, and then molten metal would be poured into the space in the mold. Humanity's first honey and bee hunts were probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a nest of bees somewhere and rate it, probably without a lot of protection from stings or, in the case of stingless bees, from things like bites or irritating substances that they carry on their legs. Early opportunistic bee hunts probably also didn't do a lot to protect the bee colony that was being rated. People would carry away everything that they could from the nest, and when the human population was pretty small and bee colonies were really abundant, there still would have been lots of unaffected colonies so that the bees themselves survived as a species. As soon as societies developed the concept of personal property and laws related to that property, there were also laws about who owned bees. These laws included things like the ownership of nests on a person's property, the ownership of swarms that hadn't yet found a new nesting site, how nests had to be marked to show who owned them, and punishments and restitution to be paid if someone harmed someone else's bees or nests. And of course, on a more general note, there are references to bees, bees, wax, and honey all over literature all over the world, going back to the earliest uses of written language. Over time, opportunistic bee hunting and just sort of taking advantage of bees that were already there evolved into a more intentional process, with people methodically looking for bees and their nests instead of basically harvesting nests as they happened to find them, and this essentially happened everywhere on Earth that had both people and honey storing bees, with the only exceptions being in places that developed religious prohibitions against harming insects or depriving them of their honey or their brood. The exact steps involved in hunting bees depended on what kind of bees lived in a particular area, but in general, people started by watching for bees, either at water sources or near flowers. In about the year fifty CE, Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella described it this way quote, First we must try to discover how far away they are, and for this purpose liquid red ochre must be prepared. Then, after touching the backs of the bees with stocks smeared with this liquid, as they are drinking at the spring waiting in the same place, you will be able to more easily recognize the bees when they return. If they are not slow in returning, you know that they dwell in the neighborhood. But if they are late In doing so, you will calculate the distance by the period of their delay. So bees obviously are small they move fast, so it can be hard to track a bee, even for an experienced bee hunter. So people also figured out ways to make it easier to follow a bee back to the nest. In some cultures, people have physically attached something to the bees to make them more visible, like a very fine thread, or a piece of grass or a little bit of paper. This idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man, how challenging it must be to just attack something to a bee while it's drinking some water. This would both make the bee easier to see by basically sticking a little flag on it, and then also slow the bee down as it tried to carry this extra weight while it flew back to the nest. People also figured out ways to take advantage of the fact that bees generally fly in a straight line when going back to their nest, So if you collect several bees in a portable box or trap, you can let them out one at a time, following each bee until you lose sight of it. Kalumela has more detail about how this was done in the Roman Empire writing quote, the joint of a reed with the knots at either end, is cut, and a hole bored in the side of the rod thus formed, through which you should drop a little honey or boiled down must. The rod is then placed near a spring. Then when a number of bees attracted by the smell of the sweet liquid have crept into it, the rod is taken away and the thumb placed on the whole, and one bee only released at a time, which, when it has escaped, shows the line of its flight to the observer, and he, as long as he can keep up, follows it as it flies away. Then when he can no longer see the bee, he lets out another, and if it seeks the same quarter of the heavens, he persists in following his former tracks. Otherwise, he opens the hole and allows them to emerge one after another, and marks the direction in which most of them fly home, and pursues them until he is led to the lurking place of the swarm. Kalamela describes using a piece of reed for making this bee tracking trap, but other cultures have used this same basic process, making their traps out of other materials, including antlers, horns, and crafted boxes made of something like wood or metal that were created specifically for that purpose. Historically, people have also observed other animals to figure out where bees might be nesting, particularly animals like bears and honey badgers, which are also known to be fond of honey, and in parts of tropical Appa and Asia, there is also the honeyguide bird. These are birds that are fond of eating beeswax, and bee larvae, but can't easily get into the nest without help, so after finding a nest, the honeyguide will try to attract the attention of a mammal like a badger or even a person. For at least five hundred years, people in some parts of Africa, including Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey guides know that they are ready to go on a hunt. And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place to place. That's a relationship between honeyguide birds and people. Delights me. Oh same, It's so cool just in general. The fact that the bird was like, I want to get in this nest. I can't by myself. I'm gonna flap my wings around and make noise attention of something bigger. So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen to find to intentionally searching for them, they also move from just harvesting the nests when they found them to ten those nests in the wild. People have done things like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter, keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the bees were nesting to make more room, or hollowing out similar cavities nearby with the hope of attracting a swarm. People have also improved wild nests to make it easier to access their contents, things like adding little doors into a tree that a person could reach into and then close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders to reach nests that are in high places. Eventually, people also started building structures specifically with the hope of attracting bees, including in places where the bees couldn't have survived otherwise, like, for example, building thick walled cavities at oases in the Sahara Desert with the hope of sustaining bee colonies inside the walls. That gets a little closer to the way most people think of bee keeping today with purpose built enclosures to house bees in a specific location, and we'll get more into that after a sponsor break. In a very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in hives for a really long time, overlapping all that bee hunting that we just talked about earlier. This possibly goes back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture. A paper published in the journal Nature in twenty sixteen describes bees wax lipid residues that were found in Neolithic pottery samples from Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa, and these findings suggest that the pots might have been used as hives, although it's also possible that they were used to store wax that people had harvested out in the wild. We do know that people were keeping bees in hives in the Nile Delta by about five thousand bees An ancient Egyptian art is full of depictions of bees and hives and beekeeping. One relief dating back to the Fifth Dynasty, which started around twenty four to sixty five BCE, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary, suggesting that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at that point. Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian mythology as being transformed from the tears of the god Raw after they fell to earth. The first written depiction of a beehive in China dates back to about three hundred BCE, although the first Chinese references to honey as medicine are ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people started keeping stingless bees in hives made out of calabash gourds somewhere between three hundred BCE and three hundred cees, so in a lot of different parts of the world this goes back for thousands of years. These first bee hives tended to be pretty simple. Most were horizontally oriented cylinders with a small opening at one end that was big enough for bees to pass through most of the time, but not always. The other end had some kind of removable covering to allow people to harvest from the hive, sometimes after using smoke to drive the bees away from that end of the hive first. In some regions, these hives were like a long, narrow pot placed on its side, with a removable covering at one end that had a hole in the middle for the bees to pass through. Around the world, these horizontal hives were made using a variety of materials. Hollow logs, including logs that had been cut from trees with the bees already inside and then taken somewhere else, straw or grass mats rolled into a cylinder and then covered with mud or clay pottery. Sometimes people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow lines that were cut into the surface, both to give the bees a roughened anchor point when they started to build their honeycombs, and also to encourage them to build those combs in a particular direction. Other hive designs followed from these basic horizontal cylinders. Some were similar to the ones we just described, but rectangular rather than cylindrical. Others were vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees that are native to parts of Asia don't nest in enclosed spaces, so in that part of the world people attach slanted boards to trees as anchor points for honeycombs. These are known as rafters because of their resemblance to the rafters in the roof of a house, and it is not just a matter of sticking them to a tree. Beekeepers have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage, and more when selecting the exact right spot to hang a rafter. In some places, particularly in Western Europe, people have also kept bees in skeps that are woven from things like straw or wicker. These look pretty much like upside down baskets, with the open mouth resting on a flat surface and a small opening on the side that acts as a doorway for the bees. Especially in places where the weather was cool and damp, like for example, in England, steps were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the time a skeep is harvest by lifting it up off of that flat surface that it rests on and then removing the contents from underneath, but some steps also have sort of a hinged lid up at the top. In many cases, harvesting these fixed comb hives involved killing the bee colony inside. In some cases, as many bees as possible were shaken or drummed into another hive first, but a lot of the time the loss of the hive was just considered part of the process. People captured swarms of bees in the springtime, tended the hive for a season, and then harvested them before winter, starting that whole process over again the following spring, or a beekeeper might leave the hives that seemed most likely to survive the winter unharvested, with the hope that they would swarm and fill empty hives in the spring. So this was one of the reasons why people started trying to figure out ways to make bee hives that had removable colmbs to try to preserve more of the bee colonies. If you could easily remove just some sections of honeycomb without damaging the others or the hive itself, that could preserve the colony. Also, at least in theory, such a harvesting method might also be easier and cause less agitation for the bees, maybe leading to fewer stings on the beekeeper. The first hives with removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top, with a series of slats or bars placed over the opening instead of one solid lid. People had figured out that if you left some space between each slat, the bees would build separate combs, one per slat, and then you could remove a slat from the hive, taking it in the attached comb out of the hive, while leaving the rest of the combs untouched. One of the first written records of a hive like this came from French doctor Jacob Spon and English botan George Wheeler. They were traveling together and saw them in use in Attica, Greece in sixteen seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar systems also developed, apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time people started developing hives with removable combs, they had also started developing beekeeping garments that were meant to minimize stings. For much of beekeeping history, people didn't really have specific bee keeping attire in places where the bees were stingless or very gentle. It wasn't really needed in tropical regions where people didn't wear as much clothing, Sometimes they removed what they did wear to keep bees from being trapped in that fabric. In other places, people may have done sturdy clothing with long sleeves and gloves, but it really wasn't much different from what they would wear for other work. By about the fourteen hundreds, though, people in Europe had started making garments specifically for working with bees, which were intended to minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details depended somewhat on what was already fashionable in a particular place. In France, for example, the first purpose made beekeeping garments were hoods that covered the face with an insert that was made of a mesh of horsehair or wire or some other material that would offer some protection but also offer at least some visibility. Was because hoods were a little more common in terms of fashion in England, where brimmed hats were in fashion. The first beekeeping hoods were large hats with veils attached around that brim, and eventually the standard outfit also evolved to include a blouse. In seventeen ninety six, bee master John Keyes published a book called The Antient Bee Master's Farewell or Full and Plane Directions for the Management of Bees to the greatest Advantage, disclosing further improvements of the hives, boxes, and other instruments to facilitate the operations, especially that of separating double and trouble hives or boxes. Also brief remarks on Shirach and other distinguished apiators on the continent. Deduced from a series of experiments during thirty years. Oh how I love a long title. HU. It has a chapter on bee dress in which Keys advises making a hood by attaching bolting cloth to the brim of an old hat, with the brim cut down to two inches all the way around and the cloth hanging a foot in the areas around the nose, chin, and neck reinforced with oiled linen. He also recommends leather gloves, old stockings over the extremities, and an apron. If you're not familiar with bolting cloth, it's like a pretty sturdy cloth that was woven to allow for things like sifting with it. Keys also concludes this chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with bees without this bee dress, nor than without the addition of a man's coat. And I almost said breeches. Also, I don't want it tell you to dress like a man, but it might be in your best interest, but I'm not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like I almost said breaching, almost, but maybe not. Keith's book was just on the cusp of beekeeping as most people might recognize it today, and we're going to get into that after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Starting in about the seventeenth century, a couple of things happened in tandem that radically changed beekeeping pretty much around the world. One was that colonists started introducing European or Western honeybees into other parts of the world to which they were not native. This started with the first successful introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in sixteen seventeen, with those bees kept cool during the voyage across the Atlantic to try to keep them in a way intertime state of dormancy during the trip. The colonial introduction of the European honeybee into other parts of the world continued for more than two hundred years, and a lot of places European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of bees pretty much moving ahead of the colonists. The other was a shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with European honeybees. Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was a huge focus on the idea of scientific beekeeping, especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists, and others all wanted to improve the practice of beekeeping based on scientific principles, ideally in a way that allowed beekeepers to harvest from hives without killing the bees. During this process, beekeeping was being informed by new scientific discoveries about bees, and science was making new discoveries about bees thanks to beekeeping. One development that was part of this was the observation high, in other words, a hive with transparent walls that allowed people to see the bees and their work inside. And his fourteenth century work Life of Animals, al Damiri described an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle. Wrote that the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing into their business that they covered over the glass with clay. Aristotle lived in the fourth century BCE, and this fourteenth century reference seems to be the first account of him having a hive like this, so that's probably not accurate that he really did have one, but it does mean that by the time al Damiri was writing, at least the idea of an observation hive existed. I love the idea of bees building a privacy wall, though, yea. By the seventeenth century there were definitely observation hives out in the world, thanks in part to earlier developments in glassmaking. In sixteen fifty four, doctor John Wilkins gave an observation high to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented it with a diagram. A year later. On May fifth, sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive quote after dinner to mister Evelyn's he being abroad, we walked in his garden, and a lovely noble ground he hath indeed, and among other rarities, a hive of bees. So as being hived in glass, you may see the bees making their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree with Samuel Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch the bees through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm in a science museum, I get super excited when there is a glass bee enclosure. I think it's oddly soothing. There's something about it that just puts the brain at rest. Transparent hives let people get a much closer and more accurate look at a lot of day to day life of bees, including their anatomy and their reproduction. In the eighteenth century, for example, French inventor Renee and Juan Fechol del Remuer used transparent hives to do some really groundbreaking work about bee reproduction and the way that bees used their bodies to regulate the hive's temperature. In the late eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist and naturalist Francois huber took this bee observation one step forward with what he called a leaf hive. This was a beehive shaped almost like a book, with each comb in its own wooden frame and the frames on hinges so that you could move from one page to the next. Hubert used this hive in his extensive study of bees, which he undertook with the help of his wife, his son, and his assistant Francois Bernan, who helped record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This leaf hive was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it was certainly not practical for everyday beekeeping. But it was developed in the middle of a two hundred year effort to create a practical, affordable, modular bee hive for European honeybees that would allow easy removal and extraction of the honeycombs with as little disruption to the lives of the bees as possible. And there were a lot of different people who put in the work on this between the sixteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds. Most of them were in England, France, and other parts of Western Europe. As we noted earlier, there were a whole lot of bees in the Americans with this introduction of bees through colonialism, but American bee keepers weren't really involved in this until the eighteen hundreds because before that point there was just so much forage available for bees. It was very easy to keep bees. In a lot of parts of North America, they had been more focused on controlling wax moths that could really destroy the hives. The person who is typically credited for developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstross, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied and built on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstross based a lot of his work on a high developed by August Munn in eighteen thirty four, which used hanging frames with space between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth was also inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed that the frames could be moved without angering the bees too badly, and Langstrot's view the ideal hive had a lot of requirements It had to allow the beekeeper to perform every necessary function of beekeeping, including the collecting honey, without killing or injuring any bees. The beekeeper had to be able to remove combs from the hive without angering the bees or damaging the combs. The hive had to protect the bees from the elements with adequate ventilation and a removable bottom to allow for the removal of dead bees or other debris. The hive had to allow the bees to build and just to live without being required to do any extra work. And it also had to accommodate colonies of different sizes. And all of the parts of this hive that he had in mind needed to be interchangeable, so that a beekeeper could use the same parts with different hives as needed. And then, on top of all that and assorted other details, Langstroth's ideal hive needed to be combined into one cheap, simple form. Langstroth introduced his hive in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging frames with a one centimeter gap between each frame and between the edge of the frame and the interior of the hive itself. This amount of space is also described as somewhere between a quarter and three eighths of an inch. Langstroth called this small gap the bee space. Bees needed to move around the hive, but they won't build their combes in the space. The hives frames hung in a durable box of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Burkham. The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient for beekeepers to check on their beeves and to harvest their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two, and he published a book about it and about beekeeping in eighteen fifty three. The Langstroth hive and similar hives that were patterned after it, made bee keeping a lot more accessible with a much larger possible honey yield, although getting started with one did require some initial investment. It also became a lot easier for people to use Western honeybees as crop pollinators. At the same time, though, it became much easier for diseases and mites to spread through densely populated apiaries. When colony collapse disorders started making headlines in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, people wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honeybees was part of the problem. The spread of European honeybees also led to more competition with native bees for forage. There is some conflicting data about this today. Whether domesticated European honeybees are harmful to native bees can depend on the conditions in a particular area, like exactly how many domesticated bees there are, how much forage is available, and exactly what kind of forage it is. Another result of the introduction of the Langstroth hive and the surge of beekeeping that followed was an expansion of beekeeping as a field. People started forming beekeeping associations, they established beekeeping journals and other periodicals, and they started beekeeping guilds. This was a lot different from previous eras when most people who wrote about bees were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists, rather than people who were specializing just in bees and beekeeping. Although the Langstroth hive has become standard beekeeping equipment in many parts of the world, beekeeping continues to develop. This episode has been about social bees that store honey, but starting in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States and Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting bees to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments have been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural worker Warwick Estevam Kerr and others were looking for a breed of bee that might be better suited to the American tropics than European honeybees were. They imported almost fifty bee queens from Africa, which he helped to breed with European honeybee drones. Their goal was to try to create a breed that had a more docile temperament like European bees do, but was more physically adapted to life in the tropical climate like African bees. The details are not entirely clear, but in nineteen fifty seven, the queen excluders were removed from the hives that Kerr was using, something that may have been accidental, or it may have been someone trying to be helpful. Several of the hives swarmed and the bees escaped into the surrounding forests. This was the origin of what came to be known as Africanized honeybees, which tend to be more aggressive and territorial than their Western counterpart. They have since spread northward and southward through most of South America, through Central America, and into the southwestern and southern United States. There are so many other things that we could have discussed in this episode, like b mythology and religious symbolism, and how the scientific understanding of bee society evolved, and how mail order package bees came to be and other modern beehive designs, and various writers through history who thought the queen bee was really a king, and how gender roles have varied among beekeepers across global societies. Really, somebody could have a whole entire podcast that was only about beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you want a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were doing what a different types of hives and all of that, try to get your hands on a copy of the World History of Beekeeping and honey Hunting. Your most likely source to find it is in a university library. It is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred pages long, and because it's a textbook, the writing is very spare in its style. Those are seven hundred plus pages of detail about bees without a lot of extraneous side. So that's our brief history of beekeeping. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcas casts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.