FOSSILIZED BEE CREATES A BUZZ.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Think of it as a bee-osaurus.

It's as old as the dinosaurs for sure, and just as extinct. As for size, well, the tiny fossilized bee recently uncovered by an Oregon State University scientist is decidedly unlike a dinosaur, but that hasn't kept it from becoming the buzz of the entomology world.

That's because this little bee dates to 100 million years ago, making it the earliest known member of the insect line that later became today's familiar honeybee and the first to show signs that it pollinated flowers. It is helping cement the theory that bees long ago developed a taste for nectar and branched off from meat-eating wasps to pursue a life among the petals.

The discovery by OSU zoologist George Poinar is featured in the current issue of Science magazine in an article he wrote with Cornell University scientist Bryan Danforth.

Poinar discovered the specimen in a chunk of amber dug from a cave in Myanmar more than three years ago. He had set a bag of specimens aside and found the bee in a fingernail-size piece only about a year ago.

Amber begins as tree sap that can ooze over insects that happen to land in it, sealing them inside. Over time, the sap turns into a semiprecious stone, and the bug inside is fossilized.

Pieces from the same deposit also contained four tiny flowers. The flowers showed small nectaries that would have held the sweet liquid sought by bees, further strengthening the specimen's place in evolution.

"This is an intermediate form, kind of like the archaeopteryx," said Poinar, referring to the part-reptile, part-bird creature that marks another major split in animal evolution. "This bee is a specimen that still has wasp characteristics. It's mostly bee, but it still has a bit of wasp."

It's very well preserved, right down to individual hairs that are quite similar to the pollen-collecting hairs on modern bees. Its head, wings and legs also can be seen clearly.

Unlike the dominant life form of its time - the gargantuan dinosaurs - early bees and the flowers they probed for nectar were tiny. Poinar's bee is only 0.116 of an inch, the flowers not much bigger.

"It's from the early Cretaceous, so this bee would have been flitting around between dinosaurs as it went from flower to flower," he said. "This was quite exciting once I realized what it was. It's the only definite Cretaceous bee."

As small as it was, this type of bee probably played a big role in the development of plants. The rise of pollinators is thought to have led to the spread of flowering plants, known as angiosperms, that require something other than wind to spread their seeds. Angiosperms began to spread rapidly right about the time Poinar's fossil bee was buzzing among the T. rex.

Poinar, one of the world's leading experts on amber and the creatures it traps, said that although it was no Tyrannosaur, the tiny bee did have a sizable jaw for a bug of its size. So to the flowers, anyway, they might as well have been dinosaurs.

"These bees actually have very well developed, three-toothed mandibles," he said. "Some of the nectaries actually have bite marks in them."