Even if they didn't have the same methodology, they still experimented in informal ways and kept bees as a business. If you told me today that I could make bees with rotten meat and I didn't know better, it would seem like a free money printer because I can put roadkill in a box and harvest honey/royal jelly/beeswax that's still valuable today even without it being a primary sweetner/preservative/light. They were surrounded by dead animals and everything bees produce is super valuable to them both practically and economically. If seeking the path of least resistance got us all of our tools until that point, intuitive experimentation was at least powerful enough to understand things like hydrodynamics and stone construction. Yet for X centuries people either kept putting rotten meat in boxes and being disappointed without thinking about it or they thought this worked but nobody made a workshop that recycled inedible ox parts into bees. You're otherwise facing the risk of climbing a tree to collect a wild hive or setting up the wooden hive and hoping a displaced colony finds it by winter, while your era's equivalent of scientific understanding says you can just put stew scraps in a box and wait until the maggots transform.