Distribution of bees 30 points reward

The family Apidae includes all bees - solitary or social, such as honey-making bees and the lesser-known bumble bees. Trigoha and Bombus. Therefore, in the eyes of zoologists, bumblebees, regardless of gender, are a type of bee. However, the drone among honey-making bees is nicknamed "false bumblebee" and should not be confused with the bumble bee.

According to the literature, 18 species and subspecies of Apis fossils have been unearthed, including 9 extinct fossil species and 7 subspecies; and 2 extant fossil species. The latter has discovered Pliocene and Quaternary fossils. The historical and geographical distribution of these species and subspecies is shown in Table 1.

The above extinct fossil species are respectively distributed in the Palearctic region (temperate region of Eurasia), Oriental region (tropical and subtropical regions) and African region (region south of the Sahara Desert), mainly distributed in The warm and humid tropical and subtropical areas are generally located between 35° and 45° north latitude. After the Third Age, most bees became extinct, leaving only 2 living fossil species, 5 living species and a considerable number of subspecies that continue to this day. After the crustal movement of the Himalayas in the Tertiary Period, bees also migrated south to southwest my country due to changes in sea and land, subtropical and tropical climates moving southward, and the prosperity of angiosperms. As a result, southwest my country has become the area with the most species and concentration of bees in the world today.

The three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa are geographically connected without interruption. Except for these three continents, no species of the genus Apis originally existed in other continents. The bees raised today were all introduced after the discovery of the New World, starting around the mid-17th century.

At present, Asia is recognized as the birthplace of bees. The natural distribution of bees is limited to the three connected continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa and their adjacent islands (Figure 1). After the 17th century, with the rise of the global navigation industry, European bees were expanded to all continents, and even seasonal trials were successfully conducted on the tundra of Antarctica. Oriental honeybees and Western honeybees have been widely domesticated. The other five species of bees are produced in various places in Southeast Asia and South Asia, and people have long had the habit of harvesting their beeswax. Until recent years, you can still collect and sell the honey spleens of small bees at the fairs of Zhengyi and Lianhe towns in Shangsi County, a mountainous area in southern Guangxi; you can also see the honey spleens for sale at the Maodao Township market in Tongshi City, Hainan Province. Big bee honey spleen; wild giant bee populations can still be seen in the Botanical Garden of South China Tropical Crops College in Dan County, Hainan Province. In Patiana Municipal Park in Panchabu Province, India, there are 70 to 100 large bees nesting on the trunk of a big tree all year round. The park management office invites bids to harvest honey once a year. In 1988, Valli E and others reported in the world gold medal-winning photography book "The Honey Hunters of Nepal" that at an altitude of 2,500m at the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal, Gurung honey hunters climbed on a rope ladder. , collecting beeswax from the big black bees nesting under the cliffs is indeed an extraordinary and thrilling skill. In fact, giant bees are not as fierce and inaccessible as legend says. When necessary, they can be subdued by smoking. There have been reports of trial breeding in Xishuangbanna, my country and India.

It is worth mentioning that long before Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, Indians in Central America were raising wheat bees for honey; Mexicans also used special ceramic honeycombs to raise wheat bees. . Wheat wasps are only a Neotropical species, with several species found in tropical areas of Mexico and South America. Stingless bees are a pantropical species and are naturally distributed throughout my country's Hainan Island, India, Sri Lanka, Oceania, Africa and other tropical regions. Bumblebees are a species that is found in both north and south of the world. This shows that at the end of the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, when North America and Europe, South America, Africa and Oceania were separated by oceans, species of the genus Stingless Bee and Bombus had a vast territory very early. Geographical distribution.

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