Evolution
At least 30 lineages of mites have specialized in living with bees. Most mite species associated with bee nests are either sparophagous or cleptophagous. Sarophagous is when mites eat hive debris, especially parts of fungi growing. Cleptophagous is when mites eat pollen and other nutrients stored by bees. Interestingly, the small few that have evolved to become parasitic appear to have arisen from predatory lineages. The family Laelapidae has 12 genera that predate on sting-less bees (Meliponinae). Thus, it appears that the brood parasites (Varroidae) of honeybees (Apinae) evolved from the Laelapidae family.
Read more about this topic: Varroa Jacobsoni
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)