BEES
54 BBCWildlife July^2020B
eesarein trouble. From
pesticides and parasites to
colonycollapse disorder
anddwindling habitat, the
challenges they face have
causedwidespread declines
inhoneybees and wild
speciesalike.Butafteryears of reading
suchheadlines,wefind ourselves in the
oddpositionofbeingmore familiar with
theplightofbeesthanwe are with the bees
themselves.Whatdowe really know of their
history,theirbiologyand their habits? To
addresssuchdeficits,the best place to start
is withthemostbasicquestion of all: what
is a bee?Luckily,thereis an answer to that
querythatis bothmemorable and simple,
andthatreallydoessum up the major steps
inbeeevolution– a bee is a hippy wasp.
Thefirstthingtoremember is that wasps
camefirst.They’dbeen happily buzzing
aroundtheplanetformillions of years
beforebeescamealong. Bees evolved from
thewaspsandtheystill look a lot like them,
whichis whythetwogroups are so often
confused.Butif youare being harassed
at a picnic,andyousee your attackers
swarmingaroundthesausage rolls and
stealingchickenfromthe sandwiches, thendon’t blame bees. Your assailants are most
certainly wasps, because wasps are hunters
and scavengers, constantly scouring the
landscape for flies, caterpillars, spiders or
scraps of fleshy protein to take back to the
nest and feed to their larvae. Bees, on the
other hand, won’t do more than nip a bit
of berry jam or steal a sweet sip from yoursoda. That’s because the key innovation
that started them on their own evolutionary
pathway was dietary. They gave up eating
meat, and instead began provisioning
themselves and their babies solely from
the products of flowers.
The details of this transition remain
murky, because the fossil record is poor.
But it’s likely that early proto-bees targeted
flowers as a good place to hunt other
insects, and began eating pollen and nectar
inadvertently on the bodies of their prey.
Once the switch was complete, however, it
offered all sorts of advantages. Gathering
harmless pollen is a far safer way to get
a meal than, say, attacking a fearsome
spider. Soon, the behaviours and bodies of
bees began to adapt to this new lifestyle.Above: sweat bees
often nest in soil.
Right: this orchid
bee has been
preserved in copal
(a younger stage of
amber) for about 2
million years.Bees have been with us
for at least 120 million
years, since the middle
of the Cretaceous Period.
VIOLET CARPENTER BEE
XYLOCOPA VIOLACEAOne of the largest bee
species in Europe, it is
also found in Asia. There
have been sightings in the
UK and it may become
established here, due to
climate change.Clockwise from top left: Domiciano Pablo Romero Franco/Alamy; Ozgur Kerem Bulur/Science Photo Library; Neil Maclachlan/Alamy; Solvin Zankl/naturepl.com; The Natural History Museum/Alamy