Most of the stories published about bees in recent years mention that there simply are not enough of them. Around the world, honey bees, bumble bees, and other pollinators have been dying in record numbers from “mystery illnesses” that have been the subject of well-nigh-infinite speculation, but all of which likely come back to a single issue: Colonies exposed to the bulk pesticides used to maintain massive commercial farms are so weakened that they’re subject to failure from numerous causes. That includes situations where the bees have simply been sprayed into oblivion.
So with colonies collapsing, species under threat, and an entire insect apocalypse on the doorstep, it’s nice to have a good news story to report about bees, even if the good news does happen to include the phrase “giant nightmare.”
In 1859, British explorer—and underappreciated co-discoverer of evolution through natural selection—Alfred Russell Wallace collected the first example of the giant bee that was later named in his honor. The “giant” part is no joke. The body of the bee is roughly the size of an adult’s thumb, its wingspan is considerably larger than that of the bee hummingbird, and at the front end the bee packs a pair of mandibles that lend it a particularly fierce appearance. Rather than build their homes out of wax, like a honey bee, female giant bees harvest tree resin and build rigid “apartments” inside of active termite nests.
Despite its size, after Wallace collected it, the world’s biggest bee wasn’t seen again for almost a century, long enough that many researchers believed it had become extinct. Then additional specimens turned up across three tiny Indonesian islands in 1981. And that was that. A couple of additional collected specimens trickled in, but no one had seen a living Wallace’s giant bee since, and for a second time a tentative “Extinct?” tag was slapped next to the bee’s entry in some catalogs.
But, as the British Natural History Museum reported this week, the giant bee is not done yet. A team of researchers working in the same small group of islands originally visited by Wallace located and filmed examples of the giant bee still going about their bee-ness, living in the same termite mounds and proceeding with their resin-collecting ways.
While this may seem like some kind of resurrection, or even evidence that scientists are too quick to cry “extinction,” it’s really neither. For a rare insect isolated in a small, remote area to go unseen over a long period is not unusual. No one saw the giant bee for so long mostly because no one was looking for it. And the reason some worried that it might have become extinct wasn’t so much a lack of evidence, but evidence of what was happening—deforestation.
Even remote locations suffer from deforestation due to logging and agricultural development. In fact, areas such as remote islands can suffer particularly because they may have rare, highly sought-after wood, delicately balanced ecosystems, and soils that are highly vulnerable to rapid erosion when the tree cover is removed. Development on all of the islands where the bee had been previously seen simply turned what had been an already tiny potential range into one that was almost microscopic—not good for a “giant” species.
Also, just in advance of the bee being filmed in the wild, a couple of specimens had turned up at auction, where they fetched as much as $9,100 from insect collectors. That trade in an extraordinarily rare species could also put additional pressure on the remaining bees: It’s hard to keep people living on very little money from taking advantage of a resource that might earn them thousands from a few minutes’ work. The Indonesian government polices sales of endangered species, but despite being the world’s largest bees, these specimens are extremely easy to slip into a pocket or suitcase, and the species is not covered under the CITES treaty on sales of endangered fauna.
The search for Wallace’s giant bee is part of a project called Search for Lost Species that is being funded by Global Wildlife Conservation. This is the second species to be definitively “rediscovered” by that project.