1/2/2024 0 Comments Giant blue bee![]() ![]() Worse, knowledge of the bee’s existence lit up a murky corner of the internet that specializes in the trade of rare animals. With mandibles akin to garden shears, Megachile pluto is the world’s largest bee, coming in approximately four times times larger than a European honey bee (composite image). Wyman hoped the local population would take proud ownership of the bee in order to protect it, too, but the conversations tailed off, the momentum spluttered, he says. ![]() (They released it after taking photos.) Government officials in Indonesia pledged there would be a thorough survey of the bee, Wyman says, opening the way for it to be protected properly. The rediscovery of the Wallace’s giant bee, a rare slice of good wildlife-related news, was splashed across media outlets around the world, illustrated with pictures of a delighted Wyman and his colleagues holding a vial with the hefty insect inside. “I was so beaten down by the heat and the work and suddenly I felt light on my feet.” “We were just hugging and high fiving each other,” he says. Wyman’s nine-year itch had been scratched. At this point Wyman could clearly see the head and mandibles of the bee. He saw that the tunnel was lined with resin, which is what the Wallace’s giant bee does to seal its nest off from the termites.Ī local guide then climbed up for a look, Wyman says, made a hand gesture that resembled an antennae and quickly helped build a platform from branches and vines to enable the group to view. The hole was around 7 feet off the ground so Wyman propped up a branch, clambered upon it, and looked inside. ![]() ![]() “My heart started pumping then,” he says. Reluctantly, an exhausted Wyman volunteered to take a close look.Ī quick scan of the towering nest revealed nothing, Wyman says, but then a dark spot caught his eye and he realized it was an entrance hole. Then, at the end of the fifth day, they were ambling back to their car when the group spotted a termite mound located off the path. The next five, futile, days were spent trudging around fragmented forest looking for nests and “almost dying of heat stroke,” Wyman recalls.īy this point the men had almost resigned themselves to not finding the bee and were forlornly discussing whether they should take pictures of some birds instead, Wyman says. The bee liked to make its home in termite nests so the modern-day adventurers 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 nests. Plans to take samples of the bee for genetic testing were ditched due to permitting problems, so the team settled on the singular mission of being the first to see the giant in 38 years. In 2019, Wyman teamed up on an expedition with Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer, and two other researchers who had similar ambitions of rediscovering the bee in its last-known stronghold in the Indonesian islands of North Maluku. In this installment, author Oliver Milman shares a story that didn’t make it into his latest book “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World” (W. WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. ![]()
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