Apoidea
The superfamily Apoidea is a major group within the Hymenoptera, which includes two traditionally recognized lineages, the "sphecoid" wasps, and the bees. Molecular phylogeny demonstrates that the bees arose from within the traditional "Crabronidae", so that grouping is paraphyletic, and this has led to a reclassification to produce monophyletic families.

Uncredited · Public Domain · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- apoid waspPBDB
- Sits inside
- AculeataPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 140 million years on record.
The record covers at least 141 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 143.1 Mya to 0 Mya.
611 occurrences of Apoidea on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
611 occurrences- Early Cretaceous11%
- Late Cretaceous9%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Eocene43%
- Oligocene7%
- Miocene25%
- Plioceneunder 1%
- Pleistoceneunder 1%
- Holocene3%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
46 formations
- Florissant Formation49
- Upper Freshwater-Molasse Formation23
- Randeck Maar Formation22
- Shanwang Formation18
- Weald Clay Formation · Wealden Group15
- Eifel Formation14
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The named rock units Apoidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 22 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 344 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Apoidea and its relatives
EoceneWhere Apoidea and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
7,948 taxa- Formicidae20 sites
- Coleoptera15 sites
- Apidae13 sites
- Apis13 sites
- Ichneumonidae12 sites
- Gesomyrmex hoernesi11 sites
- Prenolepis henschei11 sites
- Curculionidae10 sites
- Tetraponera simplex10 sites
- Carabidae9 sites
- Cerambycidae9 sites
- Nylanderia pygmaea9 sites
- Plagiolepis klinsmanni9 sites
- Staphylinidae9 sites
- Anisoptera8 sites
- Apis (Cascapis) armbrusteri8 sites
- Araneae8 sites
- Bradoponera meieri8 sites
- Ctenobethylus goepperti8 sites
- Libellulidae8 sites
- Lygaeidae8 sites
- Pachycondyla succinea8 sites
- Prosphyracephala succini8 sites
- Tetraponera ocellata8 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 240 sites for Apoidea, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
219 references- A monograph of the Baltic amber bees and evolution of the Apoidea (Hymenoptera)84
- A monograph on fossil bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea)22
- Fossil Hymenoptera from Florissant, Colorado20
- Apoid wasps (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) from mid-Cretaceous amber of northern Myanmar17
- Wasps (Insecta: Vespida = Hymenoptera) from the Purbeck and Wealden (Lower Cretaceous) of southern England and their biostratigraphical and palaeoenvironmental significance17
- Versteinerte Honigbienen aus dem obermiocänen Randecker Maar17
- A review of the European fossil species of the bee Apis16
- Digger wasps of the subfamily Pemphredoninae (Hymenoptera, Sphecidae) from the Baltic and Taimyr amber15
- Modernisation of the Hymenoptera: ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies of the early Eocene Okanagan Highlands of western North America13
- New genera of melikertine bees with facial modifications in Baltic amber (Hymenoptera: Apidae)12
- Descriptions of Hymenoptera from Baltic amber11
- The Middle Eocene Bee Faunas of Eckfeld and Messel, Germany (Hymenoptera: Apoidea)10
Each of the 611 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 207 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Apoidea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Apoidea was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Apoidea”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itAculeata through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Latreille 1802