How Flowers Brought Bees Into Existence

4 days ago

The flower and the bee would be a very good movie title or don't you think so. We plant flowers and give bouquet to family and friends, and these flowers can be beautiful with a lot having sweet smell. Back to the Flower and the Bee I mentioned at first, we know that both organisms need one another. The bee needs flowers to live and flowers need them to pollinate.

^worldhistory

200 million years ago, we didn't have flowers on our planet although we had plants. Plants were the first to colonize our land about 450 million years ago and even when we had dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other mammals, it wasn't until after 200 million years that flowers began to blossom. Before flowers, plants had ferns, ginkgos, cycads, and conifers, also there were also insects around at the time but bees weren't one of those insects.

The way flowers appeared, Darwin was forced to call its fossil record an abominable mystery as they just appeared on earth. As we speak there are about 500 thousand known flowering plants species called angiosperm and this accounts of 9 out of every 10 plants. Unlike non-flowering plants that need the wind the pollinate, flowering plants on the other hand got smarter and found ways to pollinate even when they are stuck in a place by stem and roots.

^wikimedia

Flowers are actually reproductive organs and in other for them to be able to reproduce, insects began to do the job. About 150 million years ago, insects would go after the pollen in the flower unlike today that insects like bees go after the nectar of flowers. When insects came to flowering plants about 150 million years ago, they did so to feed on the pollen in the flower and when they visit another flower, they drop crumbs from the first flower to the other. We would say both specie had a mutualistic relationship with one getting fed, and the other getting pollinated.

As flowers began to create different varieties, insects began to see reasons to feed on their pollen and flowers also became more radiant so they can attract insects to come feed as well as spread their pollen around. With the increase in the different variety of flowers, some developed evolutionary advantage of producing sweet nectar instead of pollens, others used smells, and a lot began to brighten their colors more.

^rawpixel

Bees came into the picture when they evolved from carnivorous Wasp (Sphecidae) who would fill their nest with dead insects and since the insects contained pollen, they fed on the pollen while feeding on the insect. Evolution and natural selection led to some vegetarian wasp that fed on protein-rich pollen and nectar known as bees. With this, we can say that while their ancestors were around and insets have been pollinating flowers a long time, Bees came after flowers but they did the pollinating job well compared to any other insect that pollinates.