Which came first, the Flower or the Bee?

The flower, by two days.

The flower came first. It utilized other means of spreading pollen, mostly the wind. Some flowers happened to produce a sweet sticky nectar, which some insects and birds discovered and then the evolutionary race was on.

Flower… Just because.

I bet there were flowers that were fertilized by other means before the bee came along. But once a proto bee showed up, the flowers that fertilize that way, coevolved with the bee.

I think there were flowers first. But they didn’t have much fun until the bees showed up.

Flower first. some insect appeared/evolved and became ‘bee’ because flower(nectared flower) appeared first and they depend on flower as their main source of food.

Wikipedia seems to have a pretty good answer: “The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were pollinated by insects such as beetles, so the syndrome of insect pollination was well established before bees first appeared. The novelty is that bees are specialized as pollination agents, with behavioral and physical modifications that specifically enhance pollination, and are generally more efficient at the task than any other pollinating insect such as beetles, flies, butterflies and pollen wasps. The appearance of such floral specialists is believed to have driven the adaptive radiation of the angiosperms, and, in turn, the bees themselves.”

I never really got that whole thing about the flowers and the bees, anyway.
Could you please explain?

They both evolved independently of one another and only through adaptive evolution did they develop the close interdependency that they now enjoy.

The horribly oversimplified explanation:

Plants had already developed sexual reproduction and relied on other methods of dispersal (probably primarily wind) when some ancestor of the modern bee happened to find that some of the reproductive parts of a plant were nutritious. Because the bee found a ready source of food, he (and others like him) left lots of progeny. Those progeny and many, many generations following had an ever increasing taste for these specific plant parts. In the meantime, those plants that had extra yummy (to the bee ancestor) reproductive parts spread far and wide, because the bees accidentally helped in the fertilizing of those particular plants.

It’s like a gigantic boulder that slow starts to roll downhill – as it moves along, the speed increases. As plants and bees slowly gain an edge (as far as survival and reproduction go), the changes that create the interdependence between plants and insects become more and more striking, even in some cases resulting and two completely disparate species that cannot survive without the each other.

Nature never ceases to astonish.

The bee unless he was faking it.

Which Came First: Bees or Flowers? (New York Times, May 1995)

The story presents then-new research suggesting bees have been around twice as long as angiosperms (flowering plants), about 200 vs. 100 million years ago.

From the article:
Either flowers actually appeared much earlier than anyone can conceive, or the first bees did without flowers for a long time, feeding on and pollinating cone-bearing, woody plants known as gymnosperms, a group that includes conifers, cycads and ferns.

In the latter and more likely case, scientists said, the discovery casts serious doubt on the standard theory that flowering plants and social insects like bees more or less evolved together…. [emphasis mine]

@gasman Interesting.

The flower.

Also, the NYT story is slightly misleading. Both bees and ants evolved from wasps. Wasps were the original social insects. The ones that specialized in living in the ground evolved into ants; the ones that specialized in gathering nectar evolved into bees.

So yes, there was co-evolution. But nectar from flowers was around before bees were. (Edit: to clarify, if there were “bees” around before flowering plants they would have essentially been wasps.)

Also, the answer to “what came first, the chicken or the egg” is the egg by several hundred million years.

@Qingu Interesting. As a casual insect collector I know bees, ant, & wasps collectively as hymenoptera, but nothing about their line of descent. I don’t find it surprising that a mutually beneficial plant-animal system co-evolves. A little ‘investment’ of body changes by natural selection—both by the bee (develop ways to find nectar, grow combs for collecting it, etc.) and the flower (grow showy petals that attract bees, complex reproductive organs, etc) which facilitates sexual reproduction by cross-pollination. Wish I knew more about it.

The chicken and the egg.

I happen to have just started reading Life Ascending by biochemist Nick Lane, 2009. Looking in the index under ‘pollinator’: he says on page 121:

Although [flowering plants] first evolved in the late Jurassic,...their global takeover was long delayed, and ultimately tied to the rise of insect pollinators like bees. Flowers are pure cost to a plant.

@gasman Fascinating. How did you find the 1995 NYT article?

@Qingu Thanks. Sounds very likely to be true.

@Bluefreedom Ha! Way right answer but way wrong question. :-)

@ETpro Google, naturally. It’s the first hit on ‘first bees’. The second hit is a story about Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden!

Suppposedly NYT will soon charge for online access above a certain free threshold.

@gasman Thanks. Not thrilled to have to pay for content, but I do understand it costs to produce it and make it available.

Well not that I’m religious, nor am I trying to preach but if you go by The Bible then animals (and I think that would include insects) was made after plants.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal
Well… We all know that God wasn’t yet around, when the first bees and flowers were made, now was Zhe? ;-)

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal Well, it never hurts to get all points of view :)

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal You don’t need to rely on the Bible’s word for that. Only plants are capable of photosynthesis. Without plants, there would be nothing for animals to eat except each others, and that would not be a good long term survival strategy. You need plants first, then plant-eating animals, and only then can you toss in a few predators to help with the process of natural selection.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal and @ETpro
This question wasn’t about plants as such. It was about flowers.
And according to the bible (be it that it offers more than one option) God created man before creating plants. So not all animals came last, unless we consider ourselves not to be animals.

@whitenoise Not so. According to Genesis, vegetation, seed bearing plants and trees that bear fruit came on day three. The sun didn’t come till day four, but I’m sure plants could do OK for a single day without sun. Water creatures and birds came on day five. Day six started out with the land animals, moved to Man and then the last and crowing glory, WOMAN!

It’s interesting that the very first creation was the earth, formless and void. The rest of the universe, stars sun and moon got filled in later. For those who love to claim that science only validates the creation myth in Genesis, this ought to pose a significant problem.

@ETpro
Keep in mind that a lot of people question how much Science™ actually says about the beginning. Lots of people say that since nobody was there to observe, the Big Bang is pure speculation.
What I find more interesting is the Gap Theory, which suggests that something happened between
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ”

and

“Now the earth was [or possibly became] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
The stuff in the brackets is a translator’s footnote in the NIV.

I don’t think that there’s anything to back up the Gap Theory (some say that the gap merely spans a lot of time), but I do sometimes tire of the Creationism vs. Evolution debate.

@Nullo I hear you regarding debating creationism vs. evolution. It is beyond rare to see such a debate remain civil and fact oriented.

I was not holding forth for the Biblical account being a ay-by-day description of what really happened during creation, just setting the record straight that Genesis does not say GOd created Man before creating plants. It says the opposite. .

Atheist, all of the theories that are out there, this one has eliminated all of them because neither flower nor bee came first, is common sense, here is why. Two things that rely on one another cannot live. For instance a baby bee can not survive without a flower. The flower also cannot live without the bee’s pollen. The pollen is none because there are not any bees that can survive. I found this interesting, just got thinking about it and wondered what bees all ate, besides nectar. I already had faith, even before found out there were ghost or spirits.

@matt01smith Care to prove that flowers have absolutely no way of cross pollination without bees? Good luck. You are truly going to need it.