Our passions sometimes lead us down strange, unexpected roads. The British scientist Humphry Davy , for example, almost pioneered the use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic back in the early 19th century, except that he got hooked on it as laughing gas.
Instead of breaking through with an important, life-altering discovery, he hosted parties where people would inhale the gas and then record the effects. Ah well.
Sometimes science takes you to unusual places.
I’m not sure this team of entomologists and naturalists ever thought they’d find themselves tracking an elusive bee through the jungles of Indonesia, but they did.
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Thankfully, it was all well worth the sweat and toil in the end.
Shockingly, that’s not even the first time it was thought extinct!
Before that 1981 sighting, it hadn’t been documented for 120 years. For such a big bee, it’s pretty good at laying low.
Nobody had laid eyes on the world’s largest bee since 1981 — until an international team of researchers tracked it down in January.
Wallace’s giant bee was first described by and named after the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace — best known as the guy Darwin stole a ton of credit from — in 1858.
It was feared extinct after 38 years without a sighting.
For such a large, robust specimen, the research team had to make quite the trek to find it.
The team had spent years studying the insect before traveling to the remote North Molucca islands in Indonesia, where they spent days tramping through the jungle looking for likely homes for the bees.
It’s hard to overstate just how rare Wallace’s giant bee really is.
Not only had it not been seen since 1981, but few specimens had been collected over the years.
As in, the American Museum of Natural History has a whopping one specimen in its collection. “This is the holy grail of bees,” said Robin Moore of the organization Global Wildlife Conservation.
Wallace’s giant bee comes by its name honestly: For a bee, it’s a massive, monstrous creature.
In the image above, it’s compared to a common European honeybee. Where the honeybee might be the size of a fingernail, Wallace’s giant bee is about the size of a thumb.
With a 2.5 inch wingspan and jaws like a stag beetle, Clay Bolt, one of the researchers, called it a “flying bulldog.”
Wallace’s giant bee uses its incredible jaws to collect tree resin that it coats its nest with to protect it from invading termites.
So they let the termites do the work and then kick them out.
The result is that Wallace’s giant bee tends to be quite shy about leaving the nest.
So the researchers, already weary from jungle hiking, had to watch each promising termite mound, sometimes eight feet up in a tree, for up to half an hour, staring at it in case something moved.
The size of the bee further complicated things, too. Instead of making the bees easier to spot, the researchers often thought they had seen one only to find that they’d spotted a wasp instead.
Based on Wallace’s initial research, the team had a good idea of what to look for.
According to Wallace, giant bees make their homes in mounds built by tree-dwelling termites.
They also had the research gathered by Adam Messer, the last scientist to see one in 1981.
Finally, on their last day of a five-day search, the team’s guide spotted a promising mound up a tree, so Clay climbed up for a closer look.
Sure enough, there it was: The elusive Wallace’s giant bee, a female that refused to leave its nest for a couple of hours.
Finally, they coaxed her out with a blade of grass. “It was a remarkable, humbling moment,” Clay said.
And that was still the only sighting of Wallace’s giant bee that the team made.
So it’s no wonder the researchers are excited about their find, which they returned to its nest after a photo session.
“It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore, to have real proof right there in front of us in the wild,” Clay said.
He continued . “To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible.”
