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

The piece was originally published in Undark.

Eli was working at the American Museum of Natural History when he learned about the bee that was presumed to be extinct. Wallace's giant bee, also known as Megachile pluto, 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.

It has huge jaws from its head. The bee hadn't been seen alive since 1981 and was feared lost.

Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer, and two other researchers were part of an expedition in which they wanted to rediscover the bee in its last known stronghold in the Indonesian islands of North Maluku. Plans to take bee samples for genetic testing were scrapped due to permitting problems, so the team decided to see the giant for the first time in 38 years.

The modern-day adventurer 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 nest. The next five days were almost dying of heat stroke, as they spent a lot of time trudging around fragmented forest.

The world needs to be tasted!

By this point, the men had almost resigned themselves to not finding the bee and were considering taking pictures of birds instead. At the end of the fifth day, the group spotted a mound of pests off the path. Reluctantly, an exhausted Wyman volunteered to look at something.

He says that he saw a dark spot when he scanned the nest, but he didn't realize it was an entrance hole. The hole was 7 feet off the ground, so Wyman propped up a branch and looked inside. The tunnel was lined with a substance that the Wallace's giant bee uses to seal off its nest from the termites.

A local guide made a hand gesture that looked like an antenna and helped build a platform from branches and vines to allow the group to view. The head and mandibles of the bee were clearly seen by Wyman. He had an itch for nine years, but it had been scratched.

The rediscovery of the Wallace's giant bee, a rare slice of good wildlife-related news, was splashed across media outlets around the world. After taking photos, they released it. The Indonesian government promised a thorough survey of the bee, opening the way for it to be protected properly.

The local population was supposed to take pride in protecting the bee, but the conversations tailed off and the enthusiasm waned.

The bee's existence lit up a murky corner of the internet that deals in the trade of rare animals. After returning to the United States, Wyman saw that someone was trying to sell a specimen of the bee on eBay for a few thousand dollars, a tempting lure for the farmers and fishermen of North Maluku.

The bee had become a sort of rare trophy. In Germany, a beetle named after Adolf Hitler was considered to be at risk of extinction more than a decade ago due to its soaring popularity as a collector's item for neo-Nazis. The Wallace's giant bee was put in greater danger because it was inadvertently showcased its value to private collectors. There was another way to destroy an insect.

There are millions of undiscovered insect species that are at risk of dying off if we don't take action. If it wasn't for the world's largest bee, the Wallace's giant bee would have just been another death, squeezed from its shrinking habitat. We can say its name out loud and know that it lives among us.

Even the flurry of interest surrounding the bee didn't give it much of a reprieve.

If the world's largest bee is vulnerable, it's easy to be pessimistic about all of the millions of insect species. We may be grappling with the idea that bees are in trouble, but the reason to care about this is usually couched in human-centered terms, they pollinate our food and are a comforting sight in a summer garden. We as well as them are at risk of being undone.

The Wallace's giant bee doesn't need to be zipping around making sure the locals have plenty of cucumbers and apples to eat. The bee's value is unrelated to humans. After all, insects have been on Earth for more than a thousand years. They have created the world we live in and ensure that it remains constant despite our excesses.

The giant bee is just like the everyday earwigs, crickets, and moths. It is part of the fabric of our world, the only known life in this universe, and our self-importance is a poor arbiter of which elements we should allow to be casually extinguished.

People talk about economic value or what ends up on our plates, but there is always an intrinsic value to insects.

We are losing this incredible part of our natural history and Earth's heritage.