THE FIRST CERAMICISTS: THE BEES
- 8 May
- 2 dakikada okunur
An article titled “The First Ceramicists: Ancient Clay Structures Built by Bees,” published in the March issue of Ceramics Now magazine, reveals that ancient bees were master ceramicists. Thousands of years before humans, bees were working clay, solving material problems, and creating durable structures.
Kelly Parks, who wrote the article in the magazine, begins as follows: “I’ve spent twenty years watching ground-nesting bees on my Montana property, observing how they select sites, assess soil conditions, and engineer their brood chambers with a precision that rivals any studio potter I know. When I learned that paleontologists recently discovered 20,000-year-old bee nests preserved inside fossilized bones in a Dominican cave—tiny clay structures with smooth, waterproofed walls that predate human pottery by millennia—everything clicked into place (Viñola-López, L. W., Riegler, M., Bloch, J. I., & MacFadden, B. J. (2024). Trace fossils within mammal remains reveal novel bee nesting behaviour. Royal Society Open Science, 11, 241260.).”
In fact only about 10% of bee species build the wax honeycombs we picture when we think “beehive.” The other 90%—roughly 4,000 species in North America alone—nest in the ground, excavate tunnels and shape brood chambers from clay-rich soils. And bees have been doing this since before humankind's production of ceramics. Early human potters, like Japan’s Jomon people, sought out the same riverside clay deposits where ground-nesting bees build their most successful colonies. Both bees and humans understood that particle size and moisture retention were important, and that not all soils were created equal.
The earliest pottery was hand-built using coiling and pinching—methods that mirror how bees compact and shape clay with their mandibles and bodies (Rice, 2015). Both create hollow structures that must support their own weight while protecting what's inside. And here's what fascinates me most: many ground-nesting bees secrete waxy linings to waterproof their chambers. Humans eventually developed ceramic glazes for exactly the same purpose—making porous earthenware hold water (Rice, 2015). We arrived at the same solution, just tens of millions of years later.
Although Western science has only recently discovered these fossilized bee nests, indigenous communities such as the Kayapó in Brazil, the Ashaninka in Peru, the Sheka in Ethiopia, and the Hopi in Southwest America have understood the connection between bees, clay, and pottery for generations through their traditional ecological knowledge. They obtained information about soil structure, drainage, and stability from bee colonies. Bees, a cornerstone of ecosystem balance, biodiversity, and global food security, have guided human communities throughout history.
The full article can be accessed via the following link:
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