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Our love of sweets dates back to when we were climbing trees to pick fruit and tangle with bee hives. The craving for jelly beans goes back into our very origins. Imagine the brave hunter climbing a tall tree to brave the bees, throwing down hunks of sweet honeycomb to an adoring community. Surely he would have dreamed of jelly beans, long before their actual invention. Tidy, colorful, possibly growing on trees and definitely not involving risk of life and limb.

Since at least the Middle Ages we have been eating 'candied' foods, that is foods saturated with honey or sugar. In the first instance sugar was used to preserve valuable summer food items, even meats (hence the term 'sweetmeats'), so that we could have the benefit of a more varied diet in the winter.

This was also a method of presenting and preserving medicinal herbs such as aniseed by medieval apothecaries.

The realization of the hunter-gatherers bee-stung dream of jellybeans couldn't occur until very much later however. He was a dreamer ahead of his time and unfortunately for him, the technology would not happen until long after his demise.

The first major step in the right direction was in the use of sugar rather than honey. Sugar has better properties for the making of jellybeans than does honey, and less of it's own flavor. Sugarcane was first grown in India. Had not the Persians invaded in the 5th century BC, it may have been in India that the magic of jellybeans first occurred. Turkish Delight was probably the first tentative evolutionary step on the road to jellybean sapiens.

One of Columbus' greatest services to mankind, bringing us a giant leap toward jellybean heaven, was the planting of sugar cane in the New World in 1493. It grew much better there and the mass production of sugar meant that lots more things could be done with sugar than previously. The raw material for the genius mind who was to bring the jellybean into the world was now in abundance. It was only a matter of time, though there were still some major difficulties to be overcome.

Sugar was still a luxury item until the Industrial Revolution which improved production and extraction methods and brought the price down. By the 19th century, small colorful sweets which could be bought for a penny each were all the rage in civilized society. All we needed then was for the right mind to be born, to grow, and to finally solve the problem of the non-existence of jellybeans.

Perhaps this exalted being found the adulation too much and

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