Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- The giant bee was first discovered in 1859, but since has only officially sighted once.
- An international team of researchers set out to rediscover the bee in January.
- Determining exactly when a species is extinct is difficult, especially for small animals like insects.
In 1859, while exploring the remote island of Bacan in the North Moluccas, Indonesia, the renowned naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace made an astounding discovery: the Megachile pluto — the world’s largest bee. Wallace described the bee, which is about four times the size of a honeybee, as a “large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.” But for more than a century, that was the only known sighting of the Megachile pluto, and some feared that deforestation had rendered the giant insect extinct.
In 1981, biologist Adam Messer discovered several Megachile nests on Bacan and neighboring islands — a sight so rare that locals said they’d never before seen the nests. Again, it would be the only known sighting for decades.
Then, several years ago, Eli Wyman, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, and nature photographer Clay Bolt teamed up to go rediscover Wallace’ giant bee. In early 2018, the pair saw that a Megachile specimen had sold for $9,000 on eBay, creating a new sense of urgency to travel to Indonesia to find the bee.
“We decided that we had to go there,” Bolt told Earther. “Number one, to see it in the wild, to document it, but also to make local contacts in Indonesia that could begin to work with us as partners to try and figure out how to protect the bee.”
In January, Clay, Wyman and other researchers finally rediscovered Wallace’s giant…
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