World’s Largest Bee Species Thought To Be Extinct Was Rediscovered In Indonesia
Clay Bolt
A group of scientists rediscovered Wallace’s giant bee, which was thought to be extinct, in Indonesia.
Known as “Wallace’s giant bee” or Megachile pluto, a large bee species four times the size of the European honey bee hadn’t been seen since 1981. That changed when a team of scientists trudged through the humid jungles of Indonesia for five days before finally encountering the insect.
Natural history photographer Clay Bolt, entomologist Eli Wyman, behavioral ecologist Simon Robson, and ornithologist Glenn Chilton made the incredible rediscovery of the giant bee by using satellite imagery in the forests of North Moluccas.
During their sweep of the forests, they inspected every nest they came across for half an hour before it was checked off the list. The team had many encounters where they thought they had found Wallace’s giant bee, but they were mostly false alarms.
The group’s luck finally turned on the fifth and final day of their expedition, when their guide and interpreter pointed toward a peculiar nest about eight feet off the ground. When Bolt, the photographer, climbed up to inspect the nest, there he saw it: a single, female Wallace’s bee staring right at him.
“It was a remarkable, humbling moment,” Bolt recalled. Of course, he made sure to capture plenty of photographs of the giant bee. The long-lost species was finally rediscovered in the wild after decades of it being considered “extinct” due to the vast deforestation of Indonesia’s forests.
“With all the bad news coming out about things in the natural world, this gives me hope,” said Bolt. “There’s still a lot of forest and there’s time and good hope for the bee and its survival,” his teammate Robson added.
