A new finding suggests that bees may have been around about 100 million years before flowering plants appeared
A NEW discovery has challenged the age-
old belief that flowers came before bees.
While the earliest angiosperms, or flowering plants, came into existence about
120 million years ago, the oldest known
fossil of a bee is a specimen nearly 80
million years old, found trapped in
amber from what is now the city of New
Jersey in the us. But a recent discovery
suggests that bees may have been
around as long as 220 million years ago.
Stephen T Hasiotis, a palaeobiologist at the us Geological Survey in
Denver says that the evidence to support this idea comes from the fossilised
logs of the Petrified Forest in Arizona,
USA, which stood as tall trees before they
were turned into stone about 220 million years ago. These fossils bear the
tell-tale marks of insect nests and also
chambers resembling the nests of modern bees.
But Charles D Michener, an entomologist at Kansas University in
Lawrence says that although the fossil
nests looked like the nests of modern
bees, more research is needed to confirm the finding. Argues Michener, "It is
always possible that some insect no
longer extant made bcc-like nests back
then. The best evidence, of course,
would be to find some fossil bees associated with the nests."
The new finding has put palaeobiologists in a dilemma as to what the bees
were doing before the appearance of
flowering plants. They say that either
angiosperms also appeared much earlier than believed, or the bees then fed on
cone-bearing and woody plants such as
conifers. The latter case is believed to be
more likely of the 2. But choosing this
alternative raises serious doubts about
the theory that angiosperms and social
insects like bees evolved together.
Contends Hasiotis, "This new evidence suggests that insects like bees and
wasps may have facilitated the evolution
and diversification of angiosperms."
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