1. The Origin of Bees
Scientists believe that bees evolved from hunting wasps over 125 million years ago, about the same time when flowering plants appeared. These plants needed pollinators and so began the symbiotic relationship between flower and bee.
The wasp hunts insects like flies, caterpillars and spiders to feed their young but at some point during their evolution, some wasps started consuming pollen and nectar. Maybe they were on a flower consuming prey and they got covered in pollen and started to lick it off and realised they enjoyed the taste. In any case, over a long period of time, these wasps increasingly relied on the pollen and nectar and eventually evolved into today’s bees (which are completely vegetarian).
How do we know bees were stinging dinosaurs? The oldest known bee fossil is a 3mm male embedded in amber from Myanmar that has been dated at ~100 million years old. Before that, there was a bee fossil found in amber from New Jersey dated at ~80 million old, which is about the time when there was the rise and rise of angiosperms, plants that produce flowers and bear their seeds in fruits.
Today there are over 300,000 species of angiosperms and they represent about 80% of all known living green plants. Interestingly, today there are also now over 20,000 species of bees world-wide, most of which pollinate those angiosperms.
In New Zealand, there was also a recent discovery of a 14.6 million year old bee fossil discovered in mudstone near Outram in Otago, marking the first bee fossil found in Zealandia (the submerged continent that includes New Zealand). They named it Leioproctus barrydonovani, after the well known NZ entomologist, the late Barry Donovan (1941-2022). The ancient insect belongs to Leioproctus, a large genius within the plasterer bee family Colletidae.
As to what the first bee species was, no-one is completely sure. Some scientists believe the melittids occupy the most basal position in the family tree and all bees have evolved from these bees.
My next post will describe how those 20,000 bees are grouped into seven families to help make it easier for you to understand the big differences in the bees.
(Research Notes - A Guide to Native Bees of Australia, Terry Houston)
