Hint, it may not be where you’d think.
The question of the origin of the honeybee wasn’t really clear until the arrival of modern science. We knew that bees as a group arrived on the scene (in what is now Africa) during the Cretacious, some 140 million years ago, the product of a pro-veggie schism among wasp like carnivores.
Later, very much like humans in fact, some bees spread out of Africa, in two distinct waves, east and west, to populate the continents of Europe and Asia. Consequently, we can chart the genesis of modern bees, like the Western Honeybee we love, to the Eastern wave. They have their roots, it seems, in what is now the Philippines.
Chronologically, Bees that we’d recognise as honeybees arose during the Miocene epoch between 23 and 5 million years ago. They really haven’t changed much since.
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