A new species of bee has been discovered and identified in downtown Toronto by a York University researcher, known to some as the “bee guru.”

Jason Gibbs, a 30-year-old biologist, has identified 19 new species of sweat bees across Canada, creating a buzz in the biology world.

In total his work identifies and describes 84 species of sweat bees — named for their attraction to perspiration — that have been previously neglected and poorly studied by biologists. The thesis has been published in a single issue of Zootaxa on Tuesday.

Gibbs found the Toronto sweat bee while he was heading to his laboratory at York University. He was walking from home to College St., heading to the subway and something caught his eye.

“I occasionally collected bees off flowers by the sidewalk,” he explained. “And one of the ones I collected was this one.”

After studying the bee under the microscope and doing DNA testing, Gibbs was able to determine the bee he had found in downtown Toronto was a new species that previously had not been identified.

“I got out of my chair and did a little dance,” Gibbs recalled. He named the new species Lasioglossum ephialtum.

It looks subtly different from other sweat bees, but the big differences are in its DNA code, Gibbs said.

The son of a beekeeper, Gibbs has had a lifelong affection for bees. “Bees are beautiful,” he said in an interview with the Star.

“They’re fascinating. They’re not what you think they are. The bees I study, you can pick them up with your fingers and they wouldn’t sting you. It’s extremely difficult to get a bee to sting you.”

There are 19,500 species of bees in the world — 900 of those are species found in Canada. There are, however, only nine species of honey bees worldwide, Gibbs said.

Bees are responsible for not only pollinating wildflowers but also large amounts of agricultural crops. It is estimated that as many as one in every three bites of food that humans eat depends on pollination.

Gibbs said that one of the reasons sweat bees are so hard to identify is because they evolved so rapidly when they first appeared about 20 million years ago.

For the past five years Gibbs has been working on the identification of these sweat bees, examining tens of thousands of individual bees.

It was a task his supervisor, Professor Laurence Packer, described as “one of the most difficult problems in bee taxonomy in North America.”

“He took to it like a duck to water — within a year or two he was the world’s expert in this group of bees,” said Packer, who also has an international reputation for his work with bees and recently wrote a book about the important role of bees in human food production.

But Gibbs more than surpassed Packer’s expectations, finding a new species in downtown Toronto as well as on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Both discoveries Packer describes as “neat.”

In fact, Gibbs has made such an impact in the bee world that many who have been studying bees for as long as 30 years worship him, referring to him as the “bee guru,” Packer said.

Sweat bees are relatively small — only about 5 to 6 millimetres long, Gibbs said. They go relatively unnoticed by a lot of people. But Gibbs said they are very abundant and very common to Toronto. “You can almost go out and collect a sweat bee in downtown Toronto within minutes,” Gibbs said.

So he was truly astonished when he realized he’d found a new species of sweat bee in the downtown core. “You don’t expect to find a new species in such a densely populated area with such a high proportion of scientists and academics working in the area. If you went to the Congo and you found a new species of bee no one would be surprised.”

This new species of sweat bee is also fairly common in Eastern Canada and the United States. It’s a very social bee and is very common in your garden, pollinating fruits and vegetables in your backyard, Gibbs said. “Be happy it’s there,” he said. “It’s harmless.”

Gibbs also identified another sweat bee known as the cuckoo sweat bee, which like the cuckoo bird doesn’t build a nest or collect food. It has big mandibles for fighting. This sweat bee is believed to invade the nest of other sweat bees and lay its eggs on the pollen and nectar collected by its host.

Now Gibbs, the winner of a doctoral dissertation prize at York University, is off to Cornell University to continue his study of bees. And when he goes he’ll be packing not only his doctoral thesis and bee samples, but honey from his dad’s bee hives.

“I eat honey every day of my life. I have an unlimited supply because of my dad.”