Abstract
While fossils of honey bees (Apini: Apis Linnaeus) are comparatively abundant in European Oligocene and Miocene deposits, the available material from Asia is scant and represented by only a handful of localities. It is therefore significant to report a new deposit with a fossil honey bee from southern China. Apis (Synapis) dalica Engel & Wappler, sp. n., is described and figured from Middle Miocene sediments of Maguan County, southeastern Yunnan Province, China. This is the first fossil bee from the Cenozoic of southern China, and is distinguished from its close congeners present at the slightly older locality of Shanwang, Shandong in northeastern China. The species can be distinguished on the basis of wing venation differences from other Miocene Apis.
Highlights
The putatively basalmost tribe of corbiculate bees, the Euglossini, are solitary or communal, with a few examples of primitive eusocial behavior in some species (Boff et al 2015; Andrade et al 2016). Relationships among these tribes have been controversial, most evidence converges on a Darwinian null-hypothesis supporting a single origin of eusociality in the common ancestor of Bombini + Meliponini + Apini, and a single origin of the highly eusocial grade in the common ancestor of Meliponini + Apini (Michener 1990; Schultz et al 1999, 2001; Engel 2001a; Noll 2002; Cardinal and Packer 2007; Canevazzi and Noll 2015; Porto et al 2016, in press)
Fossil honey bees are comparatively uncommon in Asia relative to the wealth of material available from a variety of European deposits of Oligocene and Miocene ages (e.g., Nel et al 1999; Kotthoff et al 2011, 2013)
Most fossil honey bees in Asia have been found at a single locality in Shandong Province (Zhang 1989; Zhang et al 1994)
Summary
Honey bees (genus Apis Linnaeus) are iconic insects. The domesticated Western honey bee, Apis mellifera Linnaeus, is one of the most intensely studied animals (Winston 1991). Again largely based on fossils of the worker caste, are known from a sparse number of deposits (Zeuner and Manning 1976; Nel et al 1999), but at some they can be found in large numbers (e.g., Armbruster 1938; Kotthoff et al 2011) These fossils span a range of ages from the earliest Oligocene through to the Pleistocene (Engel 1998a, 1999a, 2006; Engel et al 2009; Kotthoff et al 2011), the taxonomic status of several putative species remains to be evaluated. The species belongs to Synapis, expanding the paleogeographic distribution of this group but extending their temporal presence slightly later into the Miocene, approximately 1–2 million years younger than those records from the Northeast
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