The World's Largest Bee

 

The World’s Largest Bee and the Cautionary Tale of Its Rediscovery by Oliver Milman

<em>Megachile pluto</em> is the world’s largest bee, coming in approximately four times times larger than a European honey bee (composite image).
Megachile pluto is the world’s largest bee, coming in approximately four times times larger than a European honey bee (composite image). Clay Bolt/claybolt.com/Re:wild

While working as a curatorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History, Eli Wyman learned about a very unusual bee that was presumed to be extinct. The bee, Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, is a massive unit. It is the largest bee in the world, four times larger than a honeybee and measuring about the length of a human thumb.

Huge mandibles hang like dastardly garden shears from its head. Or, at least, did—the bee hadn’t been seen alive since 1981 and was feared lost. “I just thought ‘someday I’ve got to go to look for this bee.’ It’s a sort of unicorn in the bee world,” Wyman says. “If you love bees, as I do,” he added, “this is the greatest possible adventure to have.”

In 2019, Wyman teamed up on an expedition with Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer, and two other researchers who had similar ambitions of rediscovering the bee in its last-known stronghold in the Indonesian islands of North Maluku. Plans to take samples of the bee for genetic testing were ditched due to permitting problems, so the team settled on the singular mission of being the first to see the giant in 38 years.

The bee liked to make its home in termite nests, so the modern-day adventurers took a boat to Halmahera, the largest of the North Maluku islands, and met with the head of the village where the bee was last seen to help locate the most likely nests. The next five, futile, days were spent trudging around fragmented forest looking for nests and “almost dying of heat stroke,” Wyman recalls.

This piece was originally published in Undark and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.

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