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At the height of the dinosaur age, roughly 130 million years ago, the first flowering plants appeared.  Whereas pinecones are suited for wind pollination, flowers are designed specifically to attract and accommodate insects, birds and, rarely, mammals.

Flowering plants arose as if from nowhere in the fossil record and rapidly increased in variety over the next 50 million years. Today, they account for about 94 percent of plants on earth—that is nearly 400,000 species! Compare that to the mere 20,000 ferns, clubmosses, cycads, and conifers alive today. What happened 130 million years ago to facilitate this remarkable explosion of flowers? In a letter to his friend Dr. Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin wrote, famously, “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.” 

While we may never know for sure, the answer to this mystery is likely bees. About the same time flowering plants began their rapid evolution, the first bees appeared in the fossil record. Sweat bees, bumble bees, leaf-cutter bees, miner bees, honeybees—over 80 percent of modern flowering plants and about a third of our food plants depend on them for pollination. Bees, along with other pollinators such as moths, butterflies, and hummingbirds, are exponentially more efficient than wind at transporting pollen, and for several reasons are much more effective at driving evolution and variety, too. 

Although the honeybee is not native to Pennsylvania, the Keystone State is home to more than 430 species of native bees, along with 125 kinds of butterflies, 350 types of pollinating moths, and one species of hummingbird! So far, we have documented almost 200 native bees, and, of course, plenty of ruby-throated hummingbirds on our grounds here at the Morris.