The world’s largest bee was found in the wild 38 years
The world’s largest bee was found in the wild 38 years after its last sighting. It was one of the planet’s top 25 ‘most wanted’ species.
Wallace’s giant bee had been flying under the radar since its last known sighting in 1981. Until a few months ago.
At 38 mm long, the bee is the world’s largest. It has a wingspan of 63.5 mm and enormous jaws, making it a fearsome sight.
But Wallace’s giant bee – officially called Megachile pluto – had been rather a camera shy for the last 38 years. The scientific community feared it had disappeared altogether, but an expedition in the Indonesian jungle caught the elusive insect on camera in January.
“I dreamed of seeing this bee – the sound of its wings, its nest, a living individual,” natural history photographer Clay Bolt told Business Insider. “When we achieved our goal, we simply couldn’t believe it.”
The bee was on the ‘most wanted’ list
Four times larger than a European honey bee, Wallace’s giant bee is about the size of a human thumb.
It boasts a set of intimidating mandibles, but these jaws aren’t for eating other bugs – the bee is vegetarian, preferring nectar and pollen. The giant bees use their mandibles to scrap sticky resin off of trees. They then use that resin to construct burrows inside termite nests, and female bees use those shelters to raise their babies.
The bee was last seen alive by entomologist Adam Messer in 1981 on North Moluccas, part of an Indonesian archipelago west of Papua New Guinea. (Another French scientist named Roch Desmier de Chenon collected a specimen seven years later, but failed to photograph or document the animal, according to National Geographic.)
Before Messer’s sighting, the previously documented encounter happened more than 100 years earlier, when scientist Alfred Russel Wallace discovered and named the insect on the Indonesian island of Bacan in 1859.
That elusive history landed Wallace’s giant bee on Global Wildlife Conservation’s list of the planet’s top 25 “most wanted” species. The list is part of the environmental organization’s Search for Lost Species program, which partners with locals around the world to find and protect species that have not been seen in decades. The full list includes 1,200 missing animals and plants.
Now, Wallace’s giant bee is no longer on there.