AfterTek

Just as some species of bird-like dinosaurs were evolving into the feathered fellows we know today, a surprising fossil find shows that the honeybees, Apis mellifera, we know and love today were also evolving in the years before the Age of the Dinosaur ended 65 million years ago.

Insect fossils are semi-rarities for fossil scholars, for a simple reason. Bugs lack bones. Most insect fossils are actually remains trapped in amber, which is fossilized tree sap. A good example is the freshly-reported fossil bee found inside an amber mine in northern Myanmar. Reported in the current Science magazine, the amber chip-contained bee is 100 million years old and belongs to a previously unknown bee species, Melittosphex burmensis.

“Other known bee fossils are 35 to 45 million years younger,” report study authors George Poinar of Oregon State University and Brad Danforth of Cornell University. The fossil bee, a male, is so well-preserved that hairs are on its back legs and pollen grains are in its grasp.

The flowering of early bees to more than 16,000 species today seems to have coincided with a burst of flowering plant species, everything from almonds to buttercups to forget-me-nots, that sprang up during the early Cretaceous period, about 139 to 99 million years ago. The bees apparently sprang from a breed of parasitic wasps that moved into pollen collecting about this time.

Now extinct, M. burmensis bears a “mosaic of wasp and bee traits,” such as a pair of wasp’s spurs on the middle limb, according to the study authors. The scientists suspect the pollen-harvesting critters played a role in the burst of flower diversity during the early Cretaceous, a period that graces us today with both the rose and the orchid.

Honey bees appear to have sprung from bumble bees about 60 million years ago and jumble up their genes more often than other insect species, according to a new study in the November Genome Research led by Martin Beye of Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. The report, and others like it, feed off the honeybee genome published last week in the journal Nature. The honey bee is the third insect genome published by scientists, after a lab workhorse, the fruit fly, and a health menace, the mosquito.

The honey bee is undoubtedly the most fun of the three, suggests Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson. In a commentary accompanying the honeybee genome, he writes, “The most celebrated characteristic of A. mellifera, next to its honey and pollination services, is, of course, the waggle dance.”

The waggle dance is the elaborate choreography a forager bee will display to the hive to relate the way to a new food source, patterns that have fascinated bee experts for decades. How a dancing social species of insects evolved from parasitical wasps millions of years ago will likely become a hot topic with the publication of the brand-new genome and finds like the ancient bee fossil serving as bookends for study of the bee family.