Quote Originally Posted by Greengage View Post
Looks like bees were around for a long time here in Ireland, I wonder what type they were and how they got here.
We had a talk at our association from paleo-botanist Valerie Hall a few years ago and she pointed out that sea levels were much lower and there was a land bridge from Europe. A large part of the North sea was low lying land a few thousand years ago - where the dogger bank is found today.
Assuming there was no bee trading in those days the bees could only have been Apis mellifera mellifera as that was/is the native bee of Northern Europe.
The uncertainty is over how many thousands of years bees have been present in Ireland as bees would have moved north as the ice sheets were retreating.
There was a recent paper posted on the forum which linked the management of bees with wax traces in cooking vessels and wax traces were not found in the far north of Europe.
The problem with insects is that they often leave no fossil or physical evidence of their presence.
They found Amm parts in an excavation of a Viking settlement at York.