For the first time ever, scientists have documented a widespread extinction of bees that occurred 65 million years ago, concurrent with the massive event that wiped out land dinosaurs and many flowering plants.
No surprise, because
Previous studies have suggested a widespread extinction among flowering plants at the K-T boundary, and it’s long been assumed that the bees who depended upon those plants would have met the same fate. Yet unlike the dinosaurs, “there is a relatively poor fossil record of bees,” says Rehan, making the confirmation of such an extinction difficult.
It’s been said that people note the dinosaur extinction because they are big, bad, and dead. No one cares about the trilobite extinction because they weren’t big or bad, just dead. And bees, as an order, don’t even make the third checkoff.
It would be fascinating to know if bees back then had the collective intelligence they do today: