Thieving honeybees offer a glimpse of flowers’ evolutionary origins

By Richard Sima

An Asian honeybee visits Gnetum luofuense

Professor Yan-bing Gong

Honeybees are championed arsenic invaluable pollinators, but sometimes they bargain pollen without helping the works that makes it. Now, a survey of pollen theft by honeybees from a benignant of non-flowering works is shedding airy connected wherefore the precise archetypal flowers whitethorn person evolved.

Honeybees’ estimation for diligent pollination is mostly well‑deserved, but they aren’t universally bully for each plants. Tao Wan astatine the Fairy Lake Botanical Garden successful Shenzhen, China, and his colleagues person discovered that, successful the tropical rainforests connected …