Spring arrives, and with it, the magnolias. Their enormous pink and white blooms unfurl in many parts of the world, but if you look closely at them, you might see a beetle land on the flowers — not a bee.
Magnolias have been relying on beetles like this for over 100 million years. Long before the first bees buzzed through a meadow, magnolias struck a deal with these clumsy, chewing pollinators. Beetles are also pollinators of other ancient plants, including water lilies and spicebush, one of the earliest plant-insect relationships.
That deal shaped magnolias into the flowers we see today — large, waxy, fragrant, and tough enough to survive the beetles’ messy feeding habits. It’s a relationship that has endured from the age of dinosaurs to the age of cities, a relic of evolution hiding in plain sight in gardens, parks, and forests around the world.
A Strategy From the Age of the Dinosaurs
Magnolias belong to one of the oldest lineages of flowering plants. Their ancestors emerged over 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. At that time, bees and butterflies had yet to evolve, and the first flowers were still figuring out how to reproduce.
As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by flightless beetles and flies as they were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago. It’s not one particular beetle species, several can pollinate magnolias.
This prehistoric partnership shaped the magnolias we see today. Unlike modern flowers that have evolved intricate ways to attract specialized pollinators — like ultraviolet color patterns for bees or long nectar spurs for hummingbirds — magnolias have remained relatively unchanged. Look at a magnolia tree today, the odds are it looks very much like its cousins from the Cretaceous.
Their blooms are large and bowl-shaped, perfect for beetles to clamber through. Their colors are muted — mostly white or soft pink — because beetles rely more on scent than sight to find food. And that intoxicating fragrance? It mimics the scent of ripe or fermenting fruit, irresistible to beetles looking for a meal.
Messy, Inefficient, but Good Enough
Flightless beetles usually get a bad rap, being considered “dumb pollinators.” They can’t perform more advance behaviors like bees and butterflies. They don’t hover gracefully or perform acrobatic feats to collect nectar. They simply plow through the petals, searching for food. In the process, they get coated in pollen, which they then carry to the next flower.
This pollination style is far from efficient. They eat their way through petals and pollen-producing structures, trampling through floral parts with little finesse. They even defecate inside the flowers — earning them the unflattering title of “mess and soil” pollinators.
Yet, despite their clumsiness, they get the job done and magnolias have stuck with them. The flowers have adapted. They’ve grown thicker, more leathery petals that can withstand the rough handling. They don’t invest in nectar, which beetles wouldn’t seek out anyway. Instead, they produce copious amounts of pollen, providing a protein-rich food source that keeps their pollinators coming back for more.
A Living Fossil in Your Backyard
While modern trees like maples and ashes have switched to wind pollination — releasing clouds of pollen to be scattered at random — magnolias have stayed true to their beetle allies. Their partnership has endured through mass extinctions, ice ages, and the rise of more sophisticated pollination strategies.
The result is a flower that has barely changed since the Cretaceous period. When you stop to admire a magnolia blossom, you are witnessing a piece of evolutionary history — a living fossil shaped by a world where dinosaurs still walked the Earth.
Magnolias, despite their ancient lineage, are largely thriving today. With around 300 species worldwide, they are cultivated as ornamental trees in gardens and cities across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. However, their status in the wild is more complicated. Habitat loss, deforestation, and climate change threaten some native magnolia species, particularly in Asia and Central America, where certain varieties are classified as endangered. While their reliance on beetle pollinators has served them well for millions of years, modern ecosystems pose new challenges, and humans (with pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction) cause even more problems.
In regions where habitat fragmentation reduces beetle populations, magnolias may struggle to reproduce naturally. Additionally, some cultivated magnolias rely on human intervention — such as grafting and artificial propagation — to sustain their numbers. Despite these pressures, magnolias remain resilient, their ancient adaptations allowing them to persist in both wild and urban landscapes.
But as magnolias bloom each spring, their ancient pollinators will be there, blundering through the petals, unwittingly carrying forward one of nature’s oldest reproductive strategies.
