{"id":351220,"date":"2025-12-19T11:00:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/fossils-suggest-that-some-ancient-burrowing-bees-made-their-homes-in-rodent-skulls\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:00:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T11:00:56","slug":"fossils-suggest-that-some-ancient-burrowing-bees-made-their-homes-in-rodent-skulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=351220","title":{"rendered":"Fossils Suggest That Some Ancient Burrowing Bees Made Their Homes in Rodent Skulls"},"content":{"rendered":"


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While cleaning fossils retrieved from a cave on a Caribbean island, a researcher noticed something strange in the hollow tooth socket of a small skull<\/h2>\n
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Margherita Bassi<\/a><\/p>\n

– Daily Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ancient bees built nests in the hollows of rodent skulls, a new study suggests
\n L. Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez et al., Royal Society Open Science<\/em>, 2025 under CC BY 4.0<\/a><\/span>
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People often appreciate fossils for the insights they reveal about ancient creatures that once roamed the Earth. At some point, burrowing bees also showed an appreciation toward old bones, but for very different\u2014and perhaps more practical\u2014reasons.<\/p>\n

In a study published December 17 in the journal\u00a0Royal Society Open Science<\/em><\/a>, paleontologists report the first known evidence of bees making themselves at home in the hollows of bones. While the researchers didn\u2019t see any bees, they did find fossils of what were likely the insects\u2019 nests in ancient rodent bones barfed up by giant, now extinct owls.<\/p>\n

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Rodent skull fragment with a fossilized bee nest in a tooth socket<\/p>\n

L. Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez et al., Royal Society Open Science<\/em>, 2025 under CC BY 4.0<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe discovery was very fortuitous. We were looking for primates, rodents, lizards and other vertebrates for our work on late Quaternary extinctions in the islands associated with humans and climatic changes,\u201d Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez<\/a>, a study co-author and paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, tells\u00a0Gizmodo<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Ed Cara. \u201cWe weren\u2019t looking for any insects because they usually don\u2019t preserve in that kind of environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team found traces of the bees\u2019 odd homemaking on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is shared by the nations Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In the latter country\u2014which takes up the island\u2019s eastern portion\u2014researchers recently discovered that a cave called Cueva de Mono is brimming with fossils.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think that this was a cave where owls lived for many generations, maybe for hundreds or thousands of years,\u201d\u00a0Vi\u00f1ola Lopez says in a\u00a0statement<\/a> from the Field Museum. \u201cThe owls would go out and hunt and then come back to the cave and throw up pellets. We find fossils of the animals that they ate, fossils from the owls themselves, and even some turtles and crocodiles who might have fallen into the cave.\u201d<\/p>\n

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An illustration of bees nesting in cavities within bones buried in the cave<\/p>\n

Jorge Mario Macho, Machuky Paleoart<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The fossils represent more than 50 different species, and many of them belonged to rodents. But while cleaning the recovered bones, Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez found something strange in the hollow tooth sockets of a mammal\u2019s jaw.<\/p>\n

The pockets had a smooth, almost sunken surface, which is not how sediments usually accumulate, he says in the statement. Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez saw the same feature in several specimens from the cave. The texture reminded him of ancient wasp cocoons he\u2019d observed on a previous fossil dig.<\/p>\n

So, the researchers took CT scans of several skull fragments\u2014deemed to be from an extinct rodent\u2014to create 3D digital versions. They also carefully removed some of the nest traces from the bones.<\/p>\n

Analyses revealed that these structures were likely made by medium-sized burrowing bees, probably from the Halictidae family. The insects may have mixed their spit with dirt to build the nests, each of which was tinier than a pencil eraser, per the statement.<\/p>\n

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Need to know: Burrowing bees<\/h4>\n

When picturing bees, we often think of honey bees swarming in big colonies around hives. But most bee species are solitary and build nests in the ground<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The research provides \u201ca two-for-one surprise,\u201d Anthony Martin<\/a>, a paleontologist at Emory University who was not involved in the study, tells Scientific American<\/a><\/em>\u2019s Stephanie Pappas. \u201cModern bees, as far as I know, aren\u2019t known to nest in caves, nor are they known to nest in these sediment-filled cavities of bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bone hollows possibly helped to keep the bees\u2019 eggs safe from predators, such as wasps. Additionally, the fossils contained up to six generations of nests stacked on top of one another, suggesting that the bees called the bones home for a very long time. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Phillip Barden<\/a>, a New Jersey Institute of Technology evolutionary biologist who did not participate in the research, tells the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>\u2019 Jack Tamisiea that he\u2019s not surprised that bees returned to the cave after finding a safe spot for their young. \u201cAny port in a storm, or any skull in a cave.\u201d<\/p>\n

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