Fossil Bees

Extracted principally from:  Engel 2001.  A monograph of the Baltic amber bees and evolution of the Apoidea (Hymenoptera) Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 259: 1-192.

The bees (Apoidea: Anthophila) are among the most famous and beloved of all insects.  Their role as pollinators is one of the most significant insect-angiosperm associations known in the biological world.  Bees have served this vital role for nearly 125 million years.  

The fossil record of bees is rather sparse, with relatively few specimens known from which to build a picture of past bee diversity.

Perhaps the most important fossil fauna of bees is the diversity of taxa present in middle Eocene (Lutetian; ca. 45 million years ago) Baltic amber.  The Eocene bee fauna of Europe was utterly different from that occurring in the same region today.  The climate of Europe during the Eocene was closer to that of a tropical forest than it was to the cold temperate habitat that we are familiar with.

Other interesting bee faunas from the past are the roughly contemporaneous ambers of Chiapas, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, both of which are significantly younger than the Baltic amber.   Of an intermediate age between the Mexican and Dominican ambers and the Baltic amber is the extensive Eocene-Oligocene deposit of Florissant, Colorado.  Florissant preserves a remarkable bee fauna, but its value is hampered by the quality of preservation.  Florissant fossils are preserved as compressions with little or no relief.  The matrix is frequently not fine enough to resolve the most minute details of bee anatomy which are critical for positive identification and meaningful comparison with amber fossils or modern species.   Nonetheless, Florissant provides an important, albeit limited, window into the Eocene-Oligocene bee fauna of central North America.

Other sites with fossils bees include Iki Island (Japan), Rott (Germany), Oeningen (Germany), Radoboj (Croatia), Shandong (China), Messel (Germany), Eckfeld (Germany), and Rubielos (Spain), among many others.

Exploration of Cretaceous and Tertiary sites throughout the world continues, all in an effort to provide a more complete picture of the fossil history of the bees.

November 2004