3 comments

  • TacticalMalice 50 minutes ago
    The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
  • chabes 4 days ago
    A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
    • williamdclt 1 hour ago
      mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anything
      • amelius 30 minutes ago
        Glad at least someone is taking advantage of these leeches with wings.
      • nkrisc 43 minutes ago
        True, all mosquitoes drink nectar, and only females of some species drink blood.
    • palata 1 hour ago
      Ants as well
      • Foobar8568 1 hour ago
        Yeah I was about to say ants with passion fruit flowers.
  • palata 1 hour ago
    Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.
    • Diogenesian 1 hour ago
      Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.
      • datakan 48 minutes ago
        Jumping spiders are smarter
      • actionfromafar 1 hour ago
        Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.
        • yubblegum 1 hour ago
          Now I am musing about spider nightmares.
          • oneeyedpigeon 49 minutes ago
            Thousands of tiny humans crawling all over you...
            • amarant 30 minutes ago
              Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?
          • ta8903 16 minutes ago
            There's a reason the average spider sleepwalks into 8 human mouths a year.
    • globular-toast 1 hour ago
      My magnolia is the only thing that seems to attract honeybees, which I rarely see otherwise. The article doesn't seem to justify the "not bees" part, though. I'd imagine bees can pollinate them too.