Aaron:

First of all, I should have spelled that “stationary,” and 
not “stationery.”  My apologies for writing on the fly, for I felt frankly 
flabbergasted.

Now, the reason why I set that arbitrary date was not to embarrass the 
original poster for the simple fact that when man used bees in prehistoric 
time, (I am trying to avoid the word “domesticated” here), he must have 
kept them stationary long enough to figure out the ways of the bees, 
probably longer than the migratory practice, which came at a later date, 
just as man had to figure out farming, first, long before he figured out 
monocrop-farming.  

I tend to think that there were migratory beekeepers, though not in modern 
scale, BEFORE monocroping; however, the seeming allegation that migratory 
beekeeping has a longer tradition than stationary beekeeping, even in 
America, needs to be verified.  Also to be considered is what percentage 
of these beeks were migrating against how many non-migratory beeks?  How 
does one judge “tradition” in the context of numbers or volumes of crop?

Yoon

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