Hi
There was a great article in the February American Bee Journal, about ancient apiaries in Portugal, color pictures and all!

In it, he says: "were these desert bees imported by the Moors, along with woven hives, in the days of the Arab rule? This seems a possible hypothesis. We will examine this question in a future article"

The plot thickens!

Allen wrote:
>A beekeeper sees something he likes and takes a queen home.  This will never change and, right or wrong,  no law -- short of making transporting queens a capital offence -- can ever stop it.

Right -- since the 1800s honeybee queens have been taken to every corner of the globe.

However, we know the Moors (and Romans) didn't carry queens around -- because they thought the leader of the hive was a King! It wasn't until the mid 1500s that a beekeeper in Spain discovered that the King was a Queen and *she* laid all the eggs in the hive, not the workers.* I don't know who discovered the feasibility of requeening.

* Discovery of the Fundamental Facts about Bees. The first description of the queen bee as a female, which laid eggs, was published in Spain in 1586, by Luis Mendez de Torres.