New Study Traces Bees Back to Supercontinent Gondwana

by Jules Da Costa, age 16

Bees are vital insects for our natural world, and a recent study shows that they're much older than we previously knew and come from a supercontinent millions of years ago.

Scientists believe that long ago, the land that is now Africa and South America were joined together and formed an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. This is apparently where bees originated, according to a 2023 study in the journal Current Biology. Researchers Silas Bessert and Eduardo Almeida claim that as the continents split up and new ones formed, the bees followed. They traveled north, spreading flowering plants.

Not only does this new understanding of the origins of bees help researchers understand the insect’s evolution, but it also helps them understand how this evolution affected plants and plant life. The diversity and spread of plants we see today is the work of those bees from long ago. By spreading plant life and collecting pollen, bees allowed plants to adapt to different geographic areas and expand outwards.

The discovery of bees’ origins also means that bees are millions of years older than researchers originally thought when Gondwana was thought to have existed. They now have reason to believe that bees originated 120 million years ago when dinosaurs went extinct. The scientists compared the genes of the bee species of today to the bee fossils of the past to show how bees have evolved and distributed over time. Using this new information, they created a genealogical model, which is essentially a family tree. It shows how the different bee species are related to each other and helps scientists understand their evolutionary history.

The historic role of plant spreading and pollination has created the biodiversity we appreciate today. The fact that bees have supported our ecosystem for millions of years is yet another reason to protect them from the threat of extinction.

[Source: Popular Mechanics]