The Evolutionary History of Bees in Time and Space

Bees are the most significant pollinators of flowering plants. This partnership began ~120 million years ago, but the uncertainty of how and when bees spread across the planet has greatly obscured investigations of this key mutualism. This project aims to present a novel analysis of bee biogeography using extensive new genomic and fossil data. We demonstrate that bees likely originated in Western Gondwana (Africa and South America) during the Early Cretaceous, shortly before the breakup of Western Gondwana. Over the course of this project, we newly sequenced ultraconserved elements for 58 species, which are deposited in this project.