A geological story more than two billion years in the making is written into the coastal sandstones of the Namibe Desert in South West Angola. As described in South West Angola by J. and S. Mendelsohn (2018), these layers record shifting continents, ancient seas, and the colossal forces that shaped the Earth’s early history. Because Angola has at times lain at the centre of supercontinents and at other times on their edges, it holds clues of great interest to both geologists and palaeontologists. Among the sediments lie the fossils of giant sea predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Standing there among these ancient formations, I couldn’t help but wonder what life the present-day desert held, and what bees I might find in such a place.
A small beetle provides scale for the massive, partly exposed jaw of a mosasaur embedded in Namibe Desert sandstone. These marine reptiles, some reaching over 15 meters in length, dominated ocean ecosystems before the extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs.
Despite its aridity, the Namibe Desert supports a unique fog-dependent ecosystem with specialised plants and adapted fauna. Fog here is a more reliable source of moisture than rain, its tiny droplets feeding small patches of vegetation.
Around one such moisture pocket, where a couple of Mesembryanthemum plants were in flower, I found bees thriving. In one of the driest seasons, eight species of solitary bees were foraging on these two small patches.
One of two small patches of Mesembryanthemum where several bee species were recorded.
To think that their ancestors may have endured the same great changes that ended the reign of the dinosaurs is mind blowing. Among them were both the female and male Fidelia bee, probably Fidelia kobrowi, otherwise unknown from anywhere north of southern Namibia, and a Ceratina bee, possibly Ceratina rhodura, the first record north of Namibia and the first record of the male.
The bees of Bentiaba
The eight bee species foraging on just two small flower patches in the Namibe Desert, including range extensions and first records, offer only a glimpse of what remains undocumented. Around two hundred bee species have so far been recorded from Angola, yet this is likely only a small part of the country’s true diversity. Vast areas remain unexplored. Michener (1979) observed that bee diversity and abundance are often highest in warm, dry regions, making these arid landscapes especially important for understanding Africa’s wild bees.
Bees, embedded in intricate ecological relationships—shaping and being shaped by their environments—as with the fog-fed flowers of the Namibe, the solitary bees nesting in Karoo riverbanks, and the specialised pollinators of Angola’s unsurveyed regions in the north and east, exist within complex natural systems that we have barely begun to understand. Economic expansion is steadily transforming these habitats into agricultural landscapes, even in countries like Angola where large tracts of intact ecosystems still persist. What took billions of years to form, and millions to populate with life continually adapting and specialising, could disappear within decades.
The bees of the Namibe are descendants of lineages that survived the planetary upheavals which ended the age of dinosaurs. Now they face an entirely different kind of extinction. The urgent task is to document, understand, and protect Angola’s wild bees and their habitats before they are lost to us forever.
References:
Elizalde, S.R.F.F. (2019). Bee diversity in Angola and community change along an altitudinal gradient at Serra da Chela (Bruco). MSc thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Michener CD (1979) Biogeography of the bees. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 66(3): 277–347.