The rediscovery of Wallace’s giant bee uncovers disheartening truths about the tenuous fate of hidden insect species
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An artists’s take on the insect
While working as a curatorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History, Eli Wyman learned about a very unusual bee that was presumed to be extinct. The bee, Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, 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.
Huge mandibles hang like dastardly garden shears from its head. Or, at least, did — the bee hadn’t been seen alive since 1981 and was feared lost. “I just thought ‘someday I’ve got to go to look for this bee.’ It’s a sort of unicorn in the bee world,” Wyman says. “If you love bees, as I do,” he added, “this is the greatest possible adventure to have.”
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. 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.
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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. The next five, futile, days were spent trudging around fragmented forest looking for nests and “almost dying of heat stroke,” Wyman recalls.
By 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. 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. Reluctantly, an exhausted Wyman volunteered to take a close look.
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A 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. “My heart started pumping then,” he says. The hole was around 7 feet off the ground so Wyman propped up a branch, clambered upon it, and looked inside. 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.
A 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. At this point Wyman could clearly see the head and mandibles of the bee. Wyman’s nine-year itch had been scratched. “We were just hugging and high fiving each other,” he says. “I was so beaten down by the heat and the work and suddenly I felt light on my feet.”
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