Un-bee-lievable!
The world’s largest bee – feared to have been extinct – has been found on a remote Indonesian island for the first time in nearly four decades, researchers said Thursday.
Roughly the size of an adult thumb with a wingspan of 2.5 inches, the Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s Giant Bee, has now been photographed and filmed alive in the wild — also for the first time.
“It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore,” said Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer specializing in bees who snapped the images of the rare insect and traveled to the island with a team of international conservationists for the expedition.
“To see how beautiful and big the species is in real life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible,” Bolt said. “My dream is to now use this rediscovery to elevate this bee to a symbol of conservation in this part of Indonesia.”
The enormous inch-and-a-half-long bee, which lives in the Indonesian island region of North Moluccas, is named after British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the insect while on an expedition in 1859.
Wallace had described the bee “a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.”
The next time anyone documented seeing the bee was more than a century later in 1981 when entomologist Adam Messer found several on the North Moluccas islands.
According to the National Geographic, Messer wrote in 1984 that the bee remains rare and that as it lives only in aerial termite mounds, it is not particularly easy to find.
Since Messer rediscovered the bee, other teams have looked, but have had no luck.
Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum in London houses the historic specimens of Wallace’s Giant Bee.
Bolt, a Montana resident, made the journey to Indonesia in January with Eli Wyman, a biologist at Princeton University, Australian biologist Simon Robson and Glen Chilton, a scholar and author.
The team searched for five days before they finally found the single female Wallace bee living in an arboreal termites’ nest in a tree about eight feet off the ground.
“We yelled and screamed and hugged each other,” Robson told the National Geographic.
The bee seemed “very relaxed,” Bolt said.
Similar to other bees, the Wallace bee feeds on nectar and pollen.
Robson told The New York Times he believes the Wallace bee is capable of stinging.
“We were all keen to get stung to see how bad it was,” Robson said, “but because we only found the one, we treated it very carefully.”
Wallace’s Giant Bee is threatened by deforestation and habitat loss, according to the National Geographic.
“Messer’s rediscovery gave us some insight, but we still know next to nothing about this extraordinary insect,” Wyman said. “I hope this rediscovery will spark future research that will give us a deeper understanding of the life history of this very unique bee and inform any future efforts to protect it from extinction.”
The expedition was partly funded by the Global Wildlife Conservation.
