Scientists Discover Ancient Bees Built Nests Inside Animal Bones
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-ancient-bees-built-nests-inside-animal-bones/
About 20,000 years ago, a family of owls occupied a cave and repeatedly regurgitated pellets packed with the bones of the animals they hunted. Those remains collected on the cave floor. Researchers have now found evidence that ancient bees later took advantage of the bones by building nests inside the empty tooth sockets. A new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science reports the discovery, marking the first known case of bees using animal bones as places to lay their eggs.
[...] To better examine the potential insect nests present in the cave fossils, Vinola Lopez and his colleagues CT scanned the bones, essentially X-raying the specimens from enough angles that they could produce 3D pictures of the compacted dirt inside the tooth sockets without destroying the fossils or disturbing the sediment.
The shapes and structures of the sediment looked just like the mud nests created by some bee species today; some of these nests even contained grains of ancient pollen that the bee mothers had sealed in the nests for their babies to eat. The researchers hypothesize that the bees mixed their saliva with dirt to make these little individual nests for their eggs; each nest was smaller than the eraser at the tip of a pencil. Building their nests inside the bones of larger animals may have protected the bees' eggs from hungry predators like wasps.
Reference: Trace fossils within mammal remains reveal novel bee nesting behaviour" by Lazaro W. Vinola-Lopez, Mitchell Riegler, Selby V. Olson, Johanset Orihuela, Julio A. Genaro and America Sanchez-Rosario, 17 December 2025, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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