THE BEE 120 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Bees are in trouble. From pesticides and parasites to colony collapse disorder and dwindling habitat, the challenges they face have caused widespread declines in honeybees and wild species alike. But after years of reading such headlines, we find ourselves in the odd position of being more familiar with the plight of bees than we are with the bees themselves. What do we really know of their history, their biology and their habits? To address such deficits, the best place to start is with the most basic question of all: what is a bee? Luckily, there is an answer to that query that is both memorable and simple, and that really does sum up the major steps in bee evolution – a bee is a hippy wasp.

Bees have been with us for at least 120 million years, since the middle of the Cretaceous Period.

The first thing to remember is that wasps came first. They’d been happily buzzing around the planet for millions of years before bees came along. Bees evolved from the wasps and they still look a lot like them, which is why the two groups