My Eocene Honey Bee

In his Amphibol blog Gunnar reported about a fossil insect literature list at fossilinsects.net which brought up some memories ...

As a student I was working at the Eocene Eckfelder Maar fossil site which is well known for it's rich insect fauna. During this job we (OK it was Stefan..) found a well preserved honey bee. A big surprise as no other honey bee of this age was known at this time (1992). Fossilinsects has a link to the EDNA Fossil Insects Database where I queried for insects from Eckfeld, Germany. The first hit was Eckfeldapis electrapoides. Googling for Eckfeldapis brought several hits e.g. a citation for:

Lutz, H., 1993. Eckfeldapis electrapoides nov.gen.n.sp., eine "Honigbiene" aus dem Mittel-Eozän des "Eckfelder-Maares" bei Manderscheid/Eifel, Deutschland (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Apinae). Mainzer Naturwissenschaftliches Archiv, 31, 177-199.

I guess this was the bee we found this day...

Anyway, these 4 weeks in Eckfeld were great and exciting and this evening I discovered some old photos which brought even more nice memories..