Discover the oldest amber primitive bees with pollen

Millions of years ago, bees evolved from wasps, but little is known about their transition from predatory insects to pollen.

A fossil bee found in amber in Myanmar, can shed light on the mysteries and is the first record of a primitive bee with pollen found together.

Insects like bees support pollination as they fly from flower to flower in search of sugary pollen and nectar. Small yellow pollen cling to their bodies and spread to the reproductive structure of the plant, allowing fertilization to occur.

Amber contains the oldest bee in the world that provides valuable information for research.

Without these six-legged pollinators, plants will struggle to reproduce and without the pollen and nectar they contain, bees will be hungry. Pollination plants and flowering plants have grown over millions of years to develop the perfect partnership.

For the newly discovered amber bee named Discoscapa apicula with pollen on its body, it showed that it had visited at least one flower before it lay permanently in the amber 100 million years ago during mid-Cretaceous period. The bee belongs to a whole new family, genus and species.

"The record of bee fossils is quite large, but most are 65 million years ago and look a lot like modern bees, " said Oregon State University researcher George Poinar Jr.

Many researchers once thought that bee-eating bees first appeared about 130 million years ago, shortly after their first flowering. In addition to being dotted with pollen grains, the fossil insect carries another clue that it visited shortly before its death.

The bee trapped in amber shares certain characteristics with today's bees, such as body hair, a circular lobe on the upper part of the body and a couple of spurs on the hind legs. It also shares traits with wasps, from which the bees evolved.

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