Honey bees have fascinated humans ever since the first cave man found a wild honey bee hive, and discovered what honey was, and how good it tasted. Man has been searching for ways to keep honey bees and obtain their delicious honey ever since. At first, men just went into wild hives, and took the honey from the bees, but they soon found out that this was a very painful way of obtaining honey. They started raising bees in "skeps", which were made of straw. This too was very painful. In the 1800's, a man by the name of Langstroth invented the modern hive, with it's interchangeable parts. That, along with the invention of the beesuit and smoker, now allowed men to manage hives, and get maximum honey production almost without pain, and also allowed the bees to live from year to year, without being killed, which was often done with the older methods.