Ancient bees were buried inside bones, fossil revealed
In a first-of-its-kind discovery, scientists have revealed that the bones of a now-extinct species provided shelter to bee brood thousands of years ago.
Illustration by George Machucci
Thousands of years ago in what is now the Dominican Republic, there was a cave full of bones. And those bones were full of bees.
In a first in paleontology, researchers have done Bees discovered to be using jaw bones of now-extinct mammals as billsIt’s unclear which species of bee was taking advantage of this fateful opportunity – only their smooth-walled nests were left behind, nestled in the teeth pockets of ancient rodents and sloths, But this kind of behavior has never been documented before, says Lazaro Vinola Lopez, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History and one of the discoverers, “It was completely unexpected,” he says,
When Vinola Lopez and his colleagues climbed the crooked entrance of a cave called Cueva de Mono, they were looking for fossil lizards, which they found in abundance. They also found thousands of bones of extinct rodents and sloths, leading them to conclude that they had reached the hunting grounds of an ancient family of owls, which likely nested in the cave and re-deposited the bones on the cave floor. Although it is difficult to precisely date the fossils, the species comes from the late Quaternary period, which began 125,000 years ago and includes species that went extinct more than 4,500 years ago, researchers said Tuesday. Royal Society Open Science,
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From “Fossils within mammal remains reveal new bee nesting behavior” by Vinola Lopez et al. Royal Society Open Science 12; December 16, 2025 (CC BY 4.0,
Within the dirt packed into the empty tooth sockets of rodent and sloth jaw bones, Vinola Lopez and her colleagues noticed strange, smooth cup-like structures that they eventually realized were made by bees. The hard, smooth walls were the result of a waterproof layer that solitary bees add to their brood cells, where insect larvae develop.
More than 90 percent of bee species live alone, and most burrow into the ground. “As far as I know, modern bees are not known to nest in caves, nor are they known to nest in cavities filled with bone sediment,” says paleontologist Anthony Martin of Emory University, who was not involved in the study but researches fossils, or burrows and tracks left by ancient animals. He called the discovery “two surprises for one”.
Vinola López and her colleagues suspect that the bees were using the bones soon after the owls buried them and that they may have done so because the soil in the surrounding forests was thin.
Paleontologists working in a cave on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola have discovered the first known example of ancient bees nesting inside pre-existing fossilized cavities.
Illustration by George Machucci
Bones filled with bee nests were found in three of the four layers of soil, suggesting that bees used the cave for a long time. There are also one-tooth cavities filled with six separate nests. “There are probably a lot of bees coming in and building a communal nest,” says Vinola Lopez.
The bones may have provided additional protection from predators such as parasitic wasps.
“It’s like a thermos,” says Martin. “They had this outer protective layer that was provided by bone, and then they had their brooding cell, which was in the sediment, so they had double protection.”
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