Under dark skies, the Beehive Cluster looks like a small nebulous object to the naked eye, and has been known since ancient times.

[4][5] Both clusters also contain red giants and white dwarfs, which represent later stages of stellar evolution, along with many main sequence stars.

[13] Wilhelm Schur, as director of the Göttingen Observatory, drew a map of the cluster in 1894.Ancient Greeks and Romans saw this object as a manger from which two donkeys, the adjacent stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis, are eating; these are the donkeys that Dionysos and Silenus rode into battle against the Titans.

[15] Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest includes the Beehive Cluster as one of seven "nebulae" (four of which are real[16]), describing it as "The Nebulous Mass in the Breast (of Cancer)".

[18] This perceived nebulous object is in the Ghost (Gui Xiu), the 23rd lunar mansion of ancient Chinese astrology.

Ancient Chinese skywatchers saw this as a ghost or demon riding in a carriage and likened its appearance to a "cloud of pollen blown from willow catkins".

It was also known by the somewhat less romantic name of Jishi qi (積屍氣, also transliterated Tseih She Ke), the "Exhalation of Piled-up Corpses".

[4][7][20] So far, eleven white dwarfs have been identified, representing the final evolutionary phase of the cluster's most massive stars, which originally belonged to spectral type B.

The finding was significant for being the first planets detected orbiting stars like Earth's Sun that were situated in stellar clusters.

[23] The announcement describing the planetary finds, written by Sam Quinn as the lead author, was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.