For the first time, paleontologists have found fossilized traces of bees nesting inside the buried bones of other animals. These fossils, thousands of years old, are the end result of a terrifying life cycle that involved ancient rodents and giant barn owls. And researchers say they may even teach us a few lessons about bees today.
“I think the most important result is to show how diverse the nesting behavior of bees can be,” study author Lazaro Vinola Lopez told Gizmodo.
An “accidental” discovery
Vinola Lopez was working as a doctoral student for the Florida Museum of Natural History when she helped excavate fossils from inside a cave on the island of Hispaniola (the cave is located on the eastern side of the island, owned by the Dominican Republic). But neither he nor his colleagues were planning to make any such discovery.
“The discovery was very serendipitous. We were looking for primates, rodents, lizards and other vertebrates for our work on late Quaternary extinctions in islands linked to humans and climate change,” he said. “We weren’t looking for any insects because they aren’t usually preserved in that kind of environment.”
The cave named Cueva de Mono contained thousands of fossils belonging to hutias, rodents related to the guinea pig. The discovery was quite surprising, considering how rare Hutia fossils had been found in this area. But Vinola Lopez also noticed that one of the fossils, a specimen of Hutia mandibles, had an unusual smoothness.
Vinola Lopez didn’t delve deeply into her potential discovery right away, and there were some obstacles along the way. Based on his earlier work with dinosaur fossils, he initially speculated that the remains of the hutia were used by wasps to build their nests, but the characteristics of such nests did not match what they found.
Eventually, however, they realized that these remains were likely used by a different insect, an ancient species of burrowing bee named Osnidum almontei, Who lived thousands of years ago. Thanks to subsequent trips inside the cave to recover more fossils, they also found evidence of these nests inside a hutia’s vertebra and the pulp cavity of a sloth tooth (sloths used to live in the Caribbean islands, but were largely wiped out by human activity).
The team’s findings were published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
unusual bees
Although we usually think of bees as social insects that build elaborate nests when in sight, Vinola López says most bee species are solitary and use a wide range of structures and materials to build nests. But while these ancient bees seem to share a lot with their modern counterparts, they also differ in important and mysterious ways.
“The bees that made these marks are similar to other bees in that they nest in the ground, but differ from all other known species in that they regularly use chambers in buried bones (such as tooth sockets),” he said. Another major difference is the cave setting of these fossils. According to the researchers, there is only one other documented example of bees using a cave for their nest, and it did not involve bees using the fossilized remains of another animal.
As best they could tell, the cave was home to a population of ancient barn owls, who also regularly used it as a dumping ground for hunting hutias. The owls may have carried rodents back home for dinner or sometimes scavenged them out of the food on the way; These remains later proved to be an attractive site for nesting bees. And while much of the surrounding area is unsuitable for these insects, caves and other areas like them may contain ample amounts of formed soil for bees to nest.
In addition to learning more about bees, the team’s research has also taught them to be more cautious.
“This changed the way we look at and prepare fossils from these cave deposits in the Dominican Republic. We now take more precautions before cleaning them to make sure we don’t destroy any of the other interesting behavior of ancient insects hidden in the sediment inside the fossils,” he said.
Ancient cave bees aren’t the only discovery researchers are hoping for. They are already working to describe several other fossils recovered from the cave, which should include never-before-seen species of mammals, reptiles and birds.
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