![]() The females are black and have stingers the males are golden and are stingerless. In the picture I took below, you might be able to see the the female and male in the tunnels on opposite sides of each other. I have seen females as well as males snuggled into separate tunnels on the same log. They are said to be solitary bees, though the ones that live in my backyard share the same log. The larvae hatch and spend some time maturing before venturing out on their own. Some of this sawdust is used to enclose the eggs which they have laid on a pollen ball in the back of the tunnel. They don't actually eat the wood, but make a fair amount of sawdust in the process of excavating their tunnels. ![]() The name comes from the Greek for wood cutter, and there you have it: they nest and rear their offspring in wood structures, or old logs, like the ones in my backyard do. This is none other than the sonoran carpenter bee, Xylocopa sonorina. I simply couldn’t believe it: we had rediscovered the Wallace’s giant bee.When you first see this bee, you might think black bumblebee, but nope, it's not even in the same genus. “I climbed up next and my headlamp glinted on the most remarkable thing I’d ever laid my eyes on. The structure was just too perfect and similar to what we expected to find.” “On the last day of searching, we found a bee nest. It was invigorating but tiring work,” he said. “Each day, we stared at termite mounds for 20 minutes at a time, then moved on to the next mound. “We also observed many other unusual species, including Polyrhachis ants, jumping spiders with extended mandibles, and gorgeous jewel beetles.” ![]() “We were excited to see a few different Megachile species, and several large bees or wasps flying past well out of reach in the canopy.” “As we walked into the dense forests for the first time, rich with the scent of clove and nutmeg hanging densely in the air, I had a hard time believing that I was actually following in Wallace’s footsteps, in an area that at times seemed little changed from his travels not much more than 150 years in the past,” said team member Clay Bolt, a photographer specializing in documenting North American bees. In January 2019, a live female was found and filmed by a team of American, Canadian and Australian biologists who set out to search for the species in the North Moluccas. He observed several males and females of the giant bee and confirmed that it was a narrow endemic species found only on three islands of the North Moluccas: Bacan, Halmahera and Tidore.Īfter 1981, the Wallace’s giant bee was not observed in the wild for almost four decades.Ī honeybee ( Apis mellifera) worker (left) compared to the Wallace’s giant bee ( Megachile pluto). The Wallace’s giant bee was believed extinct until it was rediscovered in 1981 by the American researcher Adam Catton Messer. He described it as ‘a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.’ The specimen was scientifically described a year later by the British entomologist Frederick Smith as a new species of wild bee. The species was originally discovered in 1859 by the British explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection.ĭuring his stay on the Bacan Island of the Moluccas, Wallace observed and collected a giant female bee. Females harvest tree resin to build compartments inside the termite nest, which protects the galleries. Wallace’s giant bees nest communally, apparently always within the inhabited nests of the tree-dwelling termite Microcerotermes amboinensis. Females are also remarkable for their enormous, stag beetle-like mandibles. Females may reach a length of 1.5 inches (3.8 cm), with a wingspan of 2.5 inches (6.35 cm), but males only grow to about 0.9 inches (2.3 cm) long. This species is the largest bee on Earth. ![]() The Wallace’s giant bee ( Megachile pluto) belongs to Megachilidae, a family of mostly solitary bees. A living individual of a bee species feared to be extinct has been found in the Indonesian islands known as the North Moluccas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |