Inspired by the Jefferson County Fair’s 2024 dinosaur theme, here’s a little science note on the question of what dinosaurs might have to do with bees.

Dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic era, from about 250 to 66 million years ago.  “Everything we know about non-avian dinosaurs [i.e., excluding birds, which are related because they share a common ancestor with dinosaurs] is based on fossils, which include bones, teeth, footprints, tracks, eggs, and skin impressions.”²

Much of what is known about the oldest bees comes from specimens preserved in amber, which is fossilized tree resin. We can actually see bees that coexisted with dinosaurs, because quite a few such specimens have been found and accurately dated.

Bees branched off from ancestral wasps circa 125 million years ago, therefore shared the planet with dinosaurs for about 60 million years.³  Wasp specialist Serian Sumner describes the original, ancestral bee as a solitary wasp that “turned vegetarian,” replacing meat in its diet with pollen.⁴

This bee-in-amber was discovered in what would have been a tropical jungle in the period when flowering plants were just starting to diversify, as they coevolved with insects acting as pollinators.^{5, 6}

It is a female bee that is carrying pollen on special body hairs. Many of this specimen’s features are typical of bees; others harken back to its wasp ancestor.  The species was given the name, Discoscapa apicula.

Its warm rainforest-type habitat would have been made up primarily of wind-pollinated conifers, cycads and ginkgos, with an understory of plants such as ferns and horsetails that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.

Apidae—the family that includes honey bees—is estimated to have originated  90 million years ago or earlier.^3,7  In modern times, Apidae is the largest family of bees, with about 6,000 living species, including not only the honey bees, but also bumble, carpenter, long-horned, squash, digger, cuckoo, stingless, and orchid bees as well.

About 30 million years ago in the Oligocene epoch, long after the non-avian dinosaurs had become extinct, the genus Apis (genus of honey bees) developed within Family Apidae, and its earliest fossils have been found as clear impressions left in stone. The first one of these to be discovered (late 1800s) was preserved in paper-thin layers of coal shale in Germany, and the species represented was dubbed A. henshawi Cockerell.⁸

And finally, our familiar, very much alive species, Apis mellifera, has been found in the fossil record preserved in Pleistocene copal (ancient, but not fossilized resin) from 3 million years ago.³  However, mitochondrial DNA studies and other types of analysis indicate that this species’. lineage split from other extant honeybees at least 3 million years before the date of that preserved specimen.⁹ 

And THAT is the story of “What bees have to do with dinosaurs!”