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The immediate ancestors of bees were stinging wasps in the family Crabronidae, which were predators of other insects. The switch from insect prey to pollen may have resulted from the consumption of prey insects which were flower visitors and were partially covered with pollen when they were fed to the wasp larvae.
The superfamily Apoidea is a major group (of over 30 000 species) within the Hymenoptera, which includes two traditionally recognized lineages, the "sphecoid" wasps, and the bees.
Apidae is the largest family within the superfamily Apoidea, containing at least 5700 species of bees.The family includes some of the most commonly seen bees, including bumblebees and honey bees, but also includes stingless bees (also used for honey production), carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees, and a number of other less widely known groups.
Bees look for flowers that have brightly colored petals, have a sweet or minty fragrance, are symmetrical, bloom in the daytime, and offer lots of pollen and nectar on which to feed. Bees like ...
A honey bee collecting nectar from an apricot flower.. The nectar resource in a given area depends on the kinds of flowering plants present and their blooming periods. Which kinds grow in an area depends on soil texture, soil pH, soil drainage, daily maximum and minimum temperatures, precipitation, extreme minimum winter temperature, and growing degre
The fossil history of flowering plants records the development of flowers and other distinctive structures of the angiosperms, now the dominant group of plants on land.The history is controversial as flowering plants appear in great diversity in the Cretaceous, with scanty and debatable records before that, creating a puzzle for evolutionary biologists that Charles Darwin named an "abominable ...
Hymenoptera is a large order of insects, comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants.Over 150,000 living species of Hymenoptera have been described, [2] [3] in addition to over 2,000 extinct ones. [4]
Traditionally, this family is believed to be likely the most "primitive" among extant bees, based primarily on the similarities of their mouthparts (the unique possession among bees of a bilobed glossa) to those of Crabronidae (the putative ancestors of bees), but recent molecular studies have disproved this hypothesis, placing the Melittidae ...