Wallace's giant bee (Megachile
pluto), considered to be the largest bee in the world, had not been seen since
1981. . It was thought to be extinct and found in Indonesia.
It was without counting on
the tenacity of Eli Wyman, an entomologist and expert on bees, and his colleagues,
determined to find it...
1. Striking bee spotter difficult to observe
Since its discovery,
Wallace's bee has only been seen on three Indonesian islands in the Northern
Moluccas.
The species, which lives in tropical rainforests, was first described in 1858.
But naturalists lost
sight of it for more than a century, until it was rediscovered in 1981. Since
then, no one had observed it, believing it to be extinct.
But in February 2019, an expedition aiming to find unreviewed species manages to locate a nest.
Wallace's bee is then filmed and the images are impressive to say the least.
Indeed, whether by its imposing size or by the noise it makes when it flies, this large insect imposes some.
And for good reason, the females of this species have a wingspan of 6 cm, four times the size of honeybees.
They can therefore reach the size of an adult human thumb.
Their mandibles are particularly long, which allows them to collect plant resin to build their nests in trees.
They also seem to like to nest in termite nests.
As for the males, they are smaller and their head is less wide than that of the females.
They do not live
in the colonies but they are placed in observation near the nest.
Indeed, their objective is
to hunt the intruding males but also to catch the females in flight in order to
fertilize them.
2. Giant insects used to be common
About 285 million years
ago, it was not uncommon to come across giant insects.
The reason ? The concentration of oxygen was higher than today.
Indeed, at that time the proportion of oxygen in the air was 35% compared to
21% today.
Thus, there were for
example insects that looked like dragonflies but were the size of a crow.
Indeed, they had a
wingspan of no less than 70 cm. And let's not even talk about cockroaches
then...
3. Generalities about Wallace's bee
Wallace's walnut-sized
bee, scientifically known as Megachile pluto, is the largest bee species in the
world. It was found in Indonesia.
About image: Simon Robson,
Professor of Biology at the University of Sydney and Central Queensland
University in Australia, holds a tube containing one of Wallace's giant bees.
A female of the species
was photographed and captured in January in the northern Moluccan islands of
Indonesia, the Global Wildlife Conservation Society announced this week.
Females measure up to 63.5
millimeters from wing tip to wing tip (longer than an AA battery) and 38
millimeters from head to tail, but males are smaller.
A small expedition found
the bee in its nest, a termite mound in a decaying tree, where it is believed
to be rearing its young, said Clay Bolt, an American nature photographer who
was part of the expedition.
"This is very good news," he said.
4. An exciting find
The bee was spotted in the
first time by Iswan, one of the team's two Indonesian guides, who noticed a
termite mound "very round and the size of a giant bee," Bolt wrote in
an article about the discovery.
At the team's request,
Iswan went up to investigate and quickly jumped when he saw the movement of
what he thought was either a snake or a bee.
He was followed by
entomologist Eli Wyman of the American Museum of Natural History, who confirmed
that the hole certainly looked like the nest of a giant Wallace honeybee.
Bolt then went up and
directed his headlamp into the hole.
"I saw the bee's face
looking back at me," he said in an interview with CBC News. "It was
an amazing moment. »
The team spent two hours
waiting for the bee to emerge. Finally, they tapped it gently with a blade of
grass "and it came out," Bolt said.
Previously, there had only
been two scientific reports on this species.
The first, by Alfred Russell
Wallace, the homonym of the bee and entomologist, who independently developed
the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin.
And the second observation
was made in 1981 by the American entomologist Adam C. Messer, who found six nests
in the same group of Indonesian islands.
Even locals said they had
never seen the bee when Bolt and the team arrived and started asking questions
about it.
Yet there was good reason
to believe the bee still existed, as dead specimens had been offered for sale
on sites like eBay. One of them sold last March for $11,975.
Bolt was captivated by the
bee about four years ago after Wyman showed him a specimen at the American Museum
of Natural History while doing background research for a project photographing
native bees in North America.
5. An old project is born
A few years ago, Bolt and
Wyman successfully lobbied to have the Wallace’s bee, added to the Global
Wildlife Conservation Society's "25 Most Wanted Species" list as part
of its Search for Lost Species program.
The program aims to find plant
and animal species that haven't been spotted in years or decades.
While Bolt and Wyman were
discussing a plan to search for the bee, they were contacted by Glen Chilton,
an Australian-Canadian ornithologist and writer Professor Emeritus at St.
Mary's University in Calgary and Adjunct Professor at James Cook University in
Townsville, Australia.
He had written a book on lost
species and was planning a bee-hunting trip with James Cook University
ecologist Simon Robson.
The four eventually
organized the expedition together, but Chilton became very ill after a few days
and had to leave Indonesia.
The team found the bee
about four days later, but was unable to find any more specimens during the
next two weeks.
The bee is the third of
the "25 Most Wanted Species" to be reported since the list was
published in 2017.
This news follows the
announcement earlier this week that the giant tortoise Fernandina was found
alive in the Galapagos Islands.
