The Bittersweet Parable of the Planet’s Biggest Bee – Mother Jones

Alexis Rockman/Re.wild

This story was first published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

While working as a curatorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History, Eli Wyman I learned about an unusual bee, which was believed to have disappeared. The bee Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, is a massive unit. It is four times larger than a honeybee, and about the same length as a human thumb. 

Its head is covered in huge mandibles that hang like savage garden shears. 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.”

Wyman joined Clay Bolt, a natural historian photographer, on an expedition in 2019 that sought to rediscover the bees in their last known stronghold, North Maluku, Indonesia. Due to problems with permits, plans to collect samples of the bee to test for genetics were abandoned. Instead, the team decided to focus on the singular goal of seeing the giant for the first time in 38 years.

The bee loved termite nests, so the modern-day adventurers took the boat to Halmahera (the largest of the North Maluku Islands) and met the head of the village where they last saw the bee to help them 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.

Wyman says that the men were almost ready to give up on finding the bee and were deliberating about whether or not they should photograph birds instead. They were walking back to their cars at the end the fifth day when they spotted a termite mound off the path. Wyman, exhausted, offered to take a closer view but was reluctant.

Wyman said that he had not seen anything in the towering nest, but Wyman noticed a dark spot and realized it was an entry hole. “My heart started pumping then,” he says. Wyman stood on a branch and climbed onto the hole. 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.

Wyman says that Wyman then saw a local guide climb up to take a look. He made a hand gesture resembling an antennae, and helped to build a platform out of vines and branches to allow the group to see. Wyman was able to clearly see the head, mandibles and mouth of the bee at this point. 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.”

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. (They took photos and released it. Wyman claims that Indonesian government officials pledged to conduct an exhaustive survey of the honeybee to ensure its protection.

Wyman hoped that the local population would also take pride in the bees to protect them, but conversations stalled and momentum lost. “That was a real bummer for us.”

Worse, knowledge of the bee’s existence lit up a murky corner of the internet that specializes in the trade of rare animals. Shortly after he got back to the US, 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 subsistence farmers and fishermen of North Maluku who could get a portion of this relative fortune.

The bee had become a rare trophy, much like an endangered rhinoceros, and was considered unusual. This sometimes happens with insects: In Germany, a rare beetle named after Adolf Hitler was considered at risk of extinction more than a decade ago due to its soaring popularity as a collector’s item for neo-Nazis. Wyman had wanted to highlight the conservation potential of the Wallace’s giant bee but had also inadvertently showcased its value to private collectors, placing it in greater peril. Humanity had yet found a way to eradicate an insect species.

There are millions more undiscovered insect species that live in other piles of dirt, under our feet, or in the bark of trees. These species are at high risk of becoming extinct. The Wallace’s giant bee would’ve just been another nameless fatality, squeezed from its shrinking habitat, if it wasn’t the world’s largest bee and therefore a sort of holy grail for a bunch of Western researchers. We can now see it in the eyes, speak its name loudly, and know that it is living among us.

But the most sobering aspect of the bee-finding adventure is that even the flurry of interest surrounding the species didn’t provide it much of a reprieve. “No one cares,” says Wyman, glumly. “Even for something as charismatic as the world’s largest bee we can’t seem to muster enough interest to give it a conservation status or do proper surveys.” (The bee was given vulnerable status by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2014, but has no such status designated by the Indonesian government.)

If the world’s largest bee is vulnerable, it’s easy to feel pessimistic about all of the millions of insect species without such celebrity. 

We may be grappling with the idea that bees, in general, are in trouble but the reason to care about this is usually couched in human-centric terms—they pollinate our food and are a comforting sight in a summer garden. These ties can be broken and we are at risk as well. 

The Wallace’s giant bee has no such use in unknowing servitude—it isn’t zipping around making sure the locals have plenty of cucumbers and apples to eat. The bee, as with all insects, has its own intrinsic value, which is unrelated to human beings. After all, insects have been around for more than 1,000 years than we. They have in many ways created the planet we live in, and they ensure that it continues to tick, despite our excesses. 

With its large jawline and comical appearance, the giant bee is just right to be here. It is part and parcel of the remarkable fabric of life in our world. We should not let our self-importance dictate which elements we should allow to perish.

“People talk about economic value or about what ends up on our plates, but there is always an intrinsic value to insects,” says Wyman. “We are the shepherds of these incredible creatures.”

In the end, Wyman adds, “We are losing this incredible part of our natural history and Earth’s heritage.”