More than 5,000 years ago, burrowing bees made their homes inside heaps of rodent bones buried in a cave on Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a new fossil study suggests.
The bees encountered the bones while digging to their preferred depth in the soil. They stopped to build nests inside tooth and vertebra cavities, which turned out to be the perfect size, researchers found. Most of the bones the scientists recovered were from hutias — chunky rodents that look like a cross between squirrels and beavers — but a handful were the remains of an extinct type of sloth.
