On Monday, September 7, _The Washington Post_ ran a story on the bee.
It's on Page A2 in the "Science Notebook."  Rather than type in the whole
story, I'll just list the salient points.

* A fragment of genetic material from a stingerless bee has been cloned.
  The bee has been entombed in amber more than 25 million years ago.

* It's an extract of the muscle tissue representing about one-ten-
  thousandth of the bee's genetic complement.

* The researchers are George O. Poinar, an entomologist at U.C. Berkeley,
  Raul J. Cano, a molecular biologist at Cal Poly, Hendrik Poinar, a
  grad student at Cal Poly, and David W. Roubik, a Smithsonian bee expert
  from Panama.

* The first stage of the work has been reported in Medical Science Research,
  a British journal.

* This work was acknowledged in Michael Crichton's _Jurassic Park_, and
  the labs have been filmed for Steven Spielberg's movie.  [No assurance
  that the labs will actually appear in the final cut, though. -- HH]

* The team hopes to obtain dinosaur blood from an amber-entrapped biting
  midge, extract some dinosaur DNA, and use it to trace the dinosaurs'
  lineage.

* Sequencing of the ancient DNA shows about a 7 percent difference from
  the DNA of contemporary bees.  This is a clue to the rate at which
  bees' evolution has progressed.

* The amber was found in a mine in the Dominican Republic.  It was formed
  from the sap of an extinct bean tree, which lived in the area 25-40
  million years ago.

-- Herb Huston