- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Amazing.
An article posted on the ScienceNews Web site today indicates that North America did, too, have a honey bee.
For nearly 400 years, we've been told that the honey bee (genus Apis) did not exist on this continent until 1622. That's when the colonists brought it over from Europe.The Native Americans dubbed it "the white man's fly."
But wait!
Honey bees existed at least 14 million years ago in North America, according to a fossil record recently identified by paleontologist-entomologist Michael Engle of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The fossilized female worker bee, now at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, was unearthed in paper shale from Stewart Valley, west-central Nevada. The geological epoch: Middle Miocene.
Engle, the lead author of research published in the May 7th edition of the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, says the bee is definitely a honey bee. It has the distinctive hairy eyes, wing patterns and barbs on the stinger.
Unfortunately, this ancient bee--which Engle and his colleagues have named Apis nearctica--no longer exists. The researchers say it's most similar to the extinct species, Apis armbrusteri Zeuner from the Miocene epoch of southwestern Germany.
Extension Apiculturist Eric Mussen, a member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty since 1976 and a noted authority on honey bees, tells us that "hairy eyes" is a distinctive feature of the honey bee. "All honey bees," he said, "have hairy eyes."
The Nevada bee certainly isn't the oldest known record of a fossilized bee. The oldest known bee is 100 million years old, found embedded in amber in Burma back in 2006.
But Apis nearctica is proof that North America was a native range of the honey bee. In the journal article, Engle says that "honey bees were likely truly absent" from North America duirng the Pliocense and Pleistocene, "not becoming reintroduced until the major European colonization of the New World in the early 17th century."
Fact is, the honey bee lived here, but it did not survive.
Which begs the question--OK, we have to ask--Was it some kind of a colony collapse disorder (CCD)?
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He and people like him reject the scientific method in favor
of a collection of faerie stories in a book compiled from many,
many cultures' wisdom literature. That's why the story of
Noah's Flood sounds strikingly similar to the Gilgmesh Epic
of the ancient Sumerians: the writers of the Bible borrowed
It from the Sumerians.
My question for Noah is: Which is it, pal? 6,000 years?
10,000? That's a pretty wide margin of error you're
claiming.
This from the same guy who believes that Charleton
Heston throwed down his walkin' stick and it become
a BIG ol' SNAKE.
According to Robbin Thorp, distinguished professor of entomology at UC Davis: "Ancestral honey bee reached North America 14 million years ago" but we don't know "how long it may have persisted, what its roles were in relation to the bee and plant communities that existed at the time and what happened to it. Perhaps future plant and bee fossils will provide cues to help answer these interesting questions."
Your name is fitting. In that story they scoffed at Noah as the rain came down.
Fourteen million years ago isn't really the same thing as saying there were honeybees here before Europeans. Humans didn't even arrive here for millions of years AFTER that bee had come and gone. (Humans arriving in North American only like 10,000 years ago.)
Humans hadn't even evolved yet 14 million years ago. (That was still many millions of years away as well!)
Now there actually WAS (and is) a honeybee in the Americas before the colonists arrived. That would beethe stingless honeybees that live in the jungle area of southern Mexico. They live in large colonies and make honey. They can be kept, much like Apis mellifera.
It filled my heart with love to read the story about (the first bees in America)
I am a beekeeper in Va.
I thought that the second charter from England to Jamestown brought the honeyee
I love the honey bee
Now, could the bees in Mexico be the native bees for North America that perished with the ice age?
and hide in the past with ignorance;
science is afflicted by claustophobia, the future,
and hubris.
Orobouros...
I know that until recently there were no bees in Iceland, and the beekeepers there are now struggling to settle them permanently. It is also known to me that the white man brought the European honeybee to America, but I did not know that in North America there was no such autochthonous bees. I knew about indigenous Mexican bees, and the killer bee is a Crossbreed between European, African and South American species. CCD? Of course, because in North America mountain ranges run north-south and not east-west, as the Alps in Europe. With the sudden arrival of the Ice Age, nothing prevented polar air masses to access to far south. This meant a CCD for bees, as well as a collapse for all the rest of life, insects, animals and plants. There was no time for gradual adaptation and retreat to the south. At the time, lions were also present in North America. The broken lion's tooth, found in a frozen prey, testifies that the prey was so frozen so quickly that their fiding was no longer possible. The reason for the CCD today is quite different: the varroa and man's devastating impact on the natural environment. Today's insecticides and herbicides are 1000 times more toxic than DDT decades ago. Kemofarmation boasts themselves that it suffices for the insect to just pass by, but is doomed to collapse. Man is the reason that today the rate of extinction is faster than that of the Permian extinction, 240 million years ago when 97% of living species extinted.
There is much talk about beekeeping technology and good beekeeping practice at our beekeeping lectures, but nothing about the origin of bees. On request to prepare a lecture on bees, I therefore chose this topic, on the evolution of bees and on the history of beekeeping. In my preparations, I discovered some fascinating attractions.
Einstein is attributed to the statement that mankind will die a few days after the last bees die. I do not agree with this statement myself. The ancestors of bees appeared immediately after the Permian extinction, which means they survived. The oldest ancient wasp Xielide fossil is 240 million years old. It is interesting that the wasp has remained unchanged as a living species to date. In the tree trunk holes of the 220 million-year-old petrified forest in Arizona, fossil nests were found, with cells similar to bees, which testify to the fact that at that time some insects were taking care of the breeds (larvae). 110 million years ago an explosion of flowering plants occurred. In 100 million-year-old amber of Burma (Myanmar) the earliest fossil of bees has been preserved, which has several wasp features. This shows that the bees developed from the predatory wasps that were feeding with the first pollinators. Fossil bees in 50 million years younger amber have fully developed characteristics of the genera of the modern honeybee. This and genetic researches proves that the honey bees survived the extinction of dinosaurs. For the species that survived 2 mass extinctions, the Permian, survived by only 3% of the living species and the Cretaceous in which the dinosaurs extincted and survived 27% of the living species only, I am not afraid. But I'm not sure that humanity will survive the next 100 years. A Croatian astronomer and popularizer of science is convinced that man is a dead end of evolution. He is convinced that the future belongs to eusocial species, such as bees, wasps, termites and ants, in which the whole community acts as a single organism. A man is like a dumb virus that kills his host. I'm 67 years old. During the years of my primary education, 2.7 billion people lived on Earth. Today we have more than 7 billion. Such uncontrolled reproduction will kill the planet. I do not know the recipe for a humane reduction in the global population, for example in the next 50 years back to 2.7 billion, which would also reduce the pressure on the natural environment and climate changes. Unfortunately, nobody mentions these topics. In my opinion, the development of humanity should be based on science based on ecology and humanity and not on greed.
A few words about ice age. Your autochthonous North American type of bee has collapsed due to sudden climate change, the onset of the Ice Age. Our indigenous Slovenian bee, the world-famous Apis Melifera Carnica, was finally formed at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. It is characterized by modesty. It overwinters in a small number. Winter bees live 6-8 months, as opposed to summer bees that live for only 45 days. This allows them to survive long and cold winters. With this type of bee, they also have beekeepers in Lapland, in the far north of Europe.
Since I mention Perm extinction, let me describe it. The speed of extinction of animal and plant species today is faster than that at the end of Perm (every 20 minutes one is lost), and climate change is very similar. Note that only 3% of the living species have survived! Study material is modest, and theories contradict the explanation of the cause. I succeeded in linking the causes that the theories have to do with a single theory. 240 million years ago, a 50-kilometer asteroid collided with Antarctica. It was five times bigger than the one that had fallen to Yukatan 55 million years ago and exterminated the dinosaurs. This was such a shock for the entire Earth that a strong tectonic and volcanism activity throughout the planet and the pouring of the lava on the entire Siberian plate were triggered. The ancient super-continent of Pangea broke and continents have been also led to a path that has not yet been completed. The fall itself brought huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere, and the accompanying phenomena caused an enormous increase in greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere. The global warming followed, which together contributed to the acidification of the oceans and the lack of oxygen in them. The global temperature on Earth has risen by 5 ° C. When the temperature of the water at the bottom of the oceans rose by 5 ° C, methane lakes evaporated from the bottom of the oceans, which is 5 times more greenhouse gas than CO2. As a result, the global temperature on Earth has risen by another 5 ° C. On the geological transversal in Slovenia, a 5 m thick Permian earth layer of red desert sand is visible, with no fossil remains. I assume that similarly American ground layers from Perma look. It took 70,000 years for the climate to stabilize and enable the restoration of life. It took 1 million years to re-develop the tree species and not less than 5 million years to make life on Earth normal.
Before the Perm, there was another great extinction, Devonian, 370 million years ago. In contrast to Permian extinction, it was due to the global subcooling in Devon. The hypothermia was due to an abundance of oxygen in the air, 36%. At that time, the polar ice caps reached almost to the equator. This in the oceans under the ice caps caused oxygen deficiency. An Italian scientist who studied the extinction found that no great extinction had survived species whose specimens exceeded the size of 2 dm. She discovered that Sharks, for example, who survived the extinction, only reached half a meter, but they have shrunk to 2 dm after a million of years. I assume that such an adaptation is incapable of man.
If the honey bee was introduced and the U.S. area did not have a native one, does anyone know what the primary pollinators were? Maybe that's why there were only crab apples. I wonder if the European honey bee displaced something.
That's idiotic at best. Moses died 10,000 years ago. So the Earth couldn't be 6,000 years old. That number was derived by someone who couldn't do math and just added the ages of the figures in the Bible together without accounting for the huge gaps between their births and deaths.
Jond985,
Man has been around several million years. According to the "Bible," a person gets a soul and is considered a human being when they draw their first breath after being born and it is mentioned multiple times throughout the "Bible." The Bible is philosophy not science. Philosophy is personal truth, not objective truth and it is not science. The "Bible" was revised in the 9th century and was based on superstition and proverbs. Most of it is ignorance. Over millennia, it has been edited and changed numerous times, mostly to maintain control of the gullible.