Jeffrey Hamelman wrote:
>I can't remember how many years honeybees have been on earth, but I know
>I've read that they've been around for millions and millions.
I thought it might be worthwhile to provide this tidbit:
The Cretaceous Period (135-65 million years ago) is the time of the wide
expansion of two great groups of plants--the flowering plants (angiosperms)
on land and the diatoms in water, although the first angiosperms may have
appeared as early as the Triassic. Flowering plants also triggered a great
wave of evolution among the insects. At the end of Cretaceous time, the
extinction of dinosaurs resulted in the spectacular evolution of terrestrial
mammals, and giant sharks and marine mammals replaced large reptiles in the sea.
The group of mammals known as the primates--now represented by lemurs,
monkeys, apes, and humans--dates back to the beginning of the Cenozoic Era
(65 million years ago to the present), but humanlike creatures (see
prehistoric humans) are known only from the last few million years, the
Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs.
Bees are any of 20,000 species of insects belonging to the superfamily
Apoidea and the order Hymenoptera, including such important pollinators of
plants as the bumblebees; the yellow-faced, or plasterer, bees; the mining,
or burrower, bees; and the economically important honeybees of the genus Apis.
It is thought that bees originally evolved from hunting wasps which acquired
a taste for nectar and decided to become vegetarians. Fossil evidence is
sparse but bees probably appeared on the planet about the same time as
flowering plants in the Cretaceous period, 146 to 74 million years ago. The
oldest known fossil bee, a stingless bee named Trigona prisca, was found in
the Upper Cretaceous of New Jersey, U.S.A., and dates from 96 to 74 million
years ago. It is indistinguishable from modern Trigona. The precursor of the
honeybees may have been living about this time, but fossils of the true Apis
type were first discovered in the Lower Miocene (22 to 25 million years ago)
of Western Germany.
A bee resembling Apis dorsata but much smaller (about the size of a present
day mellifera) was present in the Upper Miocene (about 12 million years
ago). It is thought that Apis florea and Apis dorsata may have existed as
separate species as early as the Oligocene period. It has not been possible
to estimate when bees of the Mellifera/Cerana type first appeared on Earth.
Mellifera and Cerana must have acquired separate identities during the
latter part of the Tertiary era. (The Tertiary Period is the older of two
subdivisions of the Cenozoic Era and represents some 63 million years of
geologic time, commencing about 65 million years ago. )
The two species were apparently physically separated at the time of the last
glaciation (which began about 70,000 years ago, and ended 10,000 years ago),
and there was no subsequent contact between them until that brought about by
human intervention in recent times. In the post glacial period Mellifera and
Cerana (and to a less extent Dorsata and Florea) have shown similar
evolution into geographical subspecies, or races.
mostly taken from "The 1997 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia"
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