Scientists abuzz at finding rare giant bee

Scientists have re-discovered the world’s biggest bee, lost to science since 1981 and thought to have become extinct.

One of the first images of a living Megachile pluto, the world’s largest bee, which is approximately four times larger than a European honey bee. Picture: Clay Bolt.

After struggling through steaming Indonesian jungle for days the expeditioners finally found the world’s biggest bee, which had been lost to science since 1981 and was thought to have become extinct.

Then, with true courage, they tried hard to get stung.

Adjunct professor Simon Robson said the giant bee, Megachile pluto, had last been seen in 1981 by an American entomologist and there were real fears it had been lost forever, prey to habitat destruction in Indonesia.

So Professor Robson and colleagues from around the world mounted an expedition to the island of Halmahera in the Indonesian Moluccas to see if they could find the huge bee, which has a wingspan of 6cm and a body roughly the size of a human thumb.

First discovered in 1859 by the famed biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection, the giant, solitary bee seems to make its nest in termite mounds in trees, which it lines with tree resin.

Wallace described the bee, commonly known as the Wallace giant bee, as “a large black wasplike insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle”.

Professor Robson, who is associated with both the University of Sydney and Central Queensland University, said the insect’s huge mandibles, or jaw appendages, may have evolved to prevent the balls of sticky resin getting stuck to its body. “The resin would probably have good antibacterial and antimicrobial properties”, he said. “And it possibly prevents termites burrowing into the nest”. The bee’s local name, he said, was Raja Ofu — king of the bees.

The mandibles have nothing to do with the bee’s ability to sting, a function with a particular interest for biologist Professor Robson and his colleagues.

“We were keen to be stung by it, to see how bad the sting is and compare our pain with the Schmidt pain index (a scale measuring the pain of various venomous insect stings),” he said.

But concern for the individual bees, rather than for themselves, scuttled the plan: “Because we didn’t find many of them, we didn’t want to put the bees through that stress.”

He was accompanied on the expedition by Glen Chilton, an honorary professor at Saint Mary’s University in Canada, Eli Wyman from Princeton University in the US and Clay Bolt, a conservation photographer from Montana. Indonesian guides helped them track the bee, in what Professor Robson described as a very remote part of the world.

“The bee hasn’t been declared extinct but people have been trying to find it without any luck. The holy grail of the bee world was to find this giant bee. Not only is it the biggest, it was discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace, so it has that connection to the theory of natural selection,” he said.