Over the past few decades bees have been rapidly dying off, but new research suggests this happened on a much larger scale 65 million years ago.
A research team modeled a carpenter bee mass extinction at the end of the "Cretaceous and beginning of the Paleogene eras, known as the K-T boundary," a University of New Hampshire news releaser reported.
Past studies have suggested that during the same time period there was a massive wipeout of flowering plants, going along with the dinosaurs' extinction. Bees that relied on those plants for survival would have died along with them.
"There is a relatively poor fossil record of bees," lead author Sandra Rehan said, explaining the difficulty of confirming the bees' die off.
The team did not let their lack of fossil evidence stop them, they used a technique called molecular phylogenetics.
The data told us something major was happening in four different groups of bees at the same time," Rehan, of UNH's College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, said. "And it happened to be the same time as the dinosaurs went extinct."
The team performed DNA sequencing on the four "tribes" which encompassed 230 carpenter bee species from all over the world excluding Antarctica to make their conclusion.
The researchers took fossil records into account, and were able to determine how old the species of bees were. Rehan believes these methods can help researchers gain a better understanding of the plight of bees throughout history.
"If you could tell their whole story, maybe people would care more about protecting them," she said. The study's findings could have important implications about today's loss in bee population and diversity.
"Understanding extinctions and the effects of declines in the past can help us understand the pollinator decline and the global crisis in pollinators today," Rehan said.
