The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae, containing three genera and twenty-seven species. Most species are found in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees and wasps, which are caught on the wing from an open perch.
About Bee-eater in brief
The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae, containing three genera and twenty-seven species. Most species are found in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers. All have long down-turned bills and medium to long wings, which may be pointed or round. They predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees and wasps, which are caught on the wing from an open perch. They form colonies, nesting in burrows tunnelled into vertical sandy banks, often at the side of a river or in flat ground. Some species are adversely affected by human activity or habitat loss, but none meet the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s vulnerability criteria, and all are therefore evaluated as \”least concern\”. Their conspicuous appearance means that they have been mentioned by ancient writers and incorporated into mythology. Bee-eater fossils from the Pleistocene have been found in Austria, and there are Holocene specimens from Israel and Russia, but all have proved to be of the extant European bee-eaters. The bee- eaters have been considered to be related to other families, such as the rollers, hoopoes and kingfishers, but ancestors of those families diverged from the bee-eatingers at least forty million years ago.
The name, now modernised as Meropaceae, is derived from Merops, the Ancient Greek for \”bee-Eater\”, and the English term ‘bee’s’ was first recorded in 1668, referring to the European species. All species are monogamous, and both parents care for the young, sometimes with assistance from related birds in a colony. Most of the eggs are white, with typically five to the clutch. The blue-bearded bee- eater is the sole member of Meropogon, which is intermediate between Nyctyornis and the typical bee- eater, having rounded wings and a smooth culmen and feathered nostrils and a relatively sluggish lifestyle. All the remaining species are normally retained in the single genus Merops. There are close relationships within this genus, for example the red-throated bee-oater and the white-fronted bee-iater form a superspecies, but formerly suggested for several decades. D.M. Aerops, Melittagus, Bombylonax, Bomcus and Bomcus, generally accepted for several genera, have not been united for decades since a 1969 paper united them in the current arrangement. M.MehmiMerrillus supercilius, M.Boerus muelleri and M.L. lescheni are the only other species in the Merops genus, with the exception of the purple-beards, which have rounded wings, a ridged culmen, and no nostril feathers.
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This page is based on the article Bee-eater published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
