All the species on earth are classified in a taxonomic system that organizes the evolutionary relationships among all the species. Taxonomy is hierarchical, with the highest categories as the most inclusive and the lower categories as the most restricted. The names of the categories are domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The three domains of life are the Bacteria, the Archaea, and the Eukaryota.
All animals, including bees, are members of the Eukaryota domain. Bees are members of the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Arthropoda, the class Insecta, and the order Hymenoptera (from the Greek hymen, for membrane, and pteron, for wing). This order includes over one hundred thousand diverse species of bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies that have been identified and described. Characteristic of most members of this order is a "wasp waist" or narrow area between the thorax and the abdomen. They also all have two pairs of wings, multi-segmented antennae that are usually longer than the head, and chewing mouthparts. The females typically have a sting on the ovipositor, and a few species have a piercing ovipositor. Hymenoptera undergo complete metamorphosis, and the males usually develop from unfertilized eggs. Many of the species in this order are social and live in colonies that can be quite large.
After four years of work by hundreds of scientists, the sequencing of the 236-million-base genome of the European honey bee Apis mellifera was completed in 2006. This is the fifth insect that has been sequenced to date, and already over ten thousand genes that influence social behavior and physiology have been identified. This new information has been hierarchically organized into a system called ProtoBee to facilitate further study by scientists around the world. Evolutionary relationships among the thousands of bee species that have been classified will undoubtedly continue to change as more information is analyzed, as is happening in the taxonomy of other animals for which the genome has already been mapped.
In 2006, a bee fossilized in amber was purchased by entomologist and amber aficionado George Poinar of Oregon State University. The amber came from an area in Myanmar (northern Burma), and it is estimated to be one hundred million years old. The bee encased in the ancient petrified sap is thus the earliest known bee pollinator. It belongs to the genus Melittosphex, and is described as from "an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea, sister to the modern bees," although it has some transitional features. While some of the first plants were larger than their current versions, the early flowers were quite small when this small bee lived, and it was just the right size to pollinate them. In fact, its hairs actually still hold a few grains of pollen.
Genotyping by Charles Whitfield and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign determined that the European honey bee came to Europe from Africa in at least two population expansions, which explains why honey bees in eastern and western Europe are genetically different, although their habitats are adjacent. European bees were introduced to the New World by settlers in the seventeenth century, and they have been genetically modified recently by the arrival of African or so-called killer bees, Apis scutellata x mellifera, with which they mate. This influx began in Brazil in 1957.
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1. How do honey bees develop and what do they eat
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