How long bees been around

As a result they had to produce an awful lot. Nature abhors waste, and it was only a matter of time before the blind stumbling of evolution arrived at a better solution in the form of insects. Pollen is very nutritious. Some winged insects now began to feed upon it and before long some became specialists in eating pollen.

Flying from plant to plant in search of their food, these insects accidentally carried pollen grains upon their bodies, trapped amongst hairs or in the joints between their segments. When the occasional pollen grain fell off the insect on to the female parts of a flower, that flower was pollinated, and so insects became the first pollinators, sex facilitators for plants.

A mutualistic relationship had begun which was to change the appearance of the earth. Although much of the pollen was consumed by the insects, this was still a vast improvement for the plants compared to scattering their pollen to the wind. To start with, insects had to seek out the unimpressive brown or green flowers amongst the surrounding foliage.

It was now to the advantage of plants to advertise the location of their flowers, so that they could be more quickly found and to attract insects away from their competitors. So began the longest marketing campaign in history, with the early water lilies and magnolias the first plants to evolve petals, conspicuously white against the forests of green.

The first pollinators may have been beetles, which many water lilies still rely on to this day. With this new reliable means of pollination, insect-pollinated plants became enormously successful and diversified.

Different plants now began vying with one another for insect attention, evolving bright colours, patterns and elaborate shapes, and the land became clothed in flowers. In this battle to attract pollinators, some flowers evolved an additional weapon — they began producing sugar-rich nectar as an extra reward. As these plants proliferated, so the opportunities for insects to specialise grew, and butterflies and some flies evolved long, tubular mouthparts with which to suck up nectar.

The most specialised and successful group to emerge were the bees, the masters of gathering nectar and pollen to this day. All bees feed more or less exclusively on nectar and pollen throughout their lives.

While many other insects such as butterflies and hoverflies feed on flowers as adults, very few do so as young too.

Flowers are sparsely distributed in the environment, and immature insects cannot fly from one to another as only adult insects have wings. The innovation unique to bees is that the adult females gather the food for their offspring, so that their larvae do not need to move at all. The larval stage is maggot-like, legless and generally rather feeble, being defenceless and capable of only very limited movement. They are entirely dependent on the food provided by the adult bees.

The first bees evolved from wasps, which were and remain predators today. Actually, there are enormous numbers of wasp species, most of whom are nothing like this.

A great many are parasitoids, with a gruesome lifestyle from which the sci-fi film Alien surely took its inspiration. The female of these wasps lays her eggs inside other insects, injecting them through a sharply pointed egg-laying tube. Once hatched, the grubs consume their hosts from the inside out, eventually bursting out of the dying bodies to form their pupae. Other wasp species catch prey and feed them to their grubs in small nests, and it is from one such wasp family, the Sphecidae, that bees evolved.

In the Sphecidae the female wasps stock a nest, usually an underground burrow, with the corpses, or the paralysed but still living bodies, of their preferred prey. They attack a broad range of insects and spiders, with different wasp species preferring aphids, grasshoppers or beetles.

At some point a species of sphecid wasp experimented with stocking its nest with pollen instead of dead insects. This could have been a gradual process, with the wasp initially adding just a little pollen to the nest provisions. As pollen is rich in protein, it would have provided a good nutritional supplement, particularly at times when prey was scarce. When the wasp eventually evolved to feed its offspring purely on pollen, it had become the first bee.

Exactly how long ago this happened we do not know for insects rarely form fossils, and so we have to piece together their history from parse information.

Occasionally, insects become trapped in tree resin which fossilises to amber, beautifully preserving them for eternity. Crawling insects such as ants seem to have become trapped most often, but it seems that bees were rarely so foolish and examples of bee fossils are particularly few. The oldest known bee in amber is about 80 million years old, and is of a type known as a stingless bee, similar to species that live today in South America.

These are advanced social bees that live in vast colonies, so it is a pretty good guess that the earliest bees were on the wing long before this. A rather different source of information on the evolution of insects is provided by analysis of DNA sequences, which allow us to make educated guesses as to how long ago different evolutionary lineages diverged.

Studies of the similarity of the DNA in wasps and bees suggest that the first bees appeared about million years ago, 50 million years before the first known fossil bee, and probably very shortly after the first flowers evolved in the Cretaceous. Over the millennia, bees have adapted to feeding on flowers in various ways.

Many species have become hairy, which helps them to brush pollen from flowers, and also to hold it in flight. In the leafcutter bees, for instance, the pollen is stored among dense hairs on the underside of the abdomen, so that the bees often appear to have bright yellow bellies.

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Then, millions of years later, that same sediment, now rock, has to become exposed through erosion so that people can find it and study it.

When things go right, even a single fossil specimen can reveal a great deal. Extinct animal species, known only from fossils, often look very different from creatures alive today. But scientists can almost always identify which branch of the tree of life they belong to, and thereby identify how they are related. The dinosaurs — T. The same is true for insects. Scientists can identify something as a bee by its distinctive features, such as the structure of its antennae, the shapes of its major body parts, and the pattern of veins in its wings.

Using these features, scientists have identified fossils of dozens of species of extinct bees. Some look like modern bees; others look quite different but are still recognizable as bees.

The oldest fossil bees look a lot like wasps. In fact, bees are thought to be a branch of the wasp family tree that evolved a vegetarian lifestyle , getting food from flowers instead of eating other insects.