Jason Gibbs, Cornell University

New York City has a bee to call its own.

Four new species of bee have been identified in the New York region, and one of them, discovered in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, has been given the mellifluous yet gritty name Lasioglossum gotham. A bee researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, John Ascher, found it in 2009 as part of a broad, ongoing bee biology survey in parks and forested areas in New York City.

Lasioglossum gotham — none of the species has a nonscientific name yet — is about the size of a grain of rice and lives in compact underground nests.

“Discovered” may be a misleading term. L. gotham and the rest have been buzzing around under the radar for years, observed in the city but confused with other species until new techniques became available to distinguish them.

“Even until very recently, they’ve been impossible to identify because they’re so small and they all look very similar,” Dr. Ascher said.

The other newly classified bee first spotted in New York City, Lasioglossum katherinae, has been sitting dead in a drawer at the museum since 1903 after being collected in Flatbush by the Rev. Jeremiah Lott Zabriskie, a legendary Brooklyn entomologist. Dr. Ascher said the bee could still be found in the region.

The other species were found in Westchester, Suffolk and Nassau Counties.

New identification techniques like DNA bar coding and digital imaging have allowed researchers to distinguish new species from others that they resemble closely.

Louise Lynch, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dr. Ascher, who lives a block from Prospect Park, spends most of his free weekends roaming the park’s forested hills with a digital camera and a small net to catch bees. When he found the new bee in the botanic garden, he said he was unable to match it perfectly with existing species.

“I knew that I didn’t know it,” he said. “I literally couldn’t put a name on it.”

He sent the bee to Jason Gibbs, a Cornell University postdoctoral researcher, for further analysis. Dr. Gibbs, who described the four New York City area species as well as seven others found in the Eastern United States, published the new descriptions on Oct. 28 in the journal Zootaxa (see monograph – pdf). Like L. gotham, most had been observed but not properly identified.

All the bees described by Dr. Gibbs are sweat bees, which get some of their nourishment from lapping sweat off the bodies of humans and other animals, though they primarily feed on pollen and nectar from flowers.

Dr. Gibbs said the bees serve a vital function as pollinators and that understanding them better can help answer larger questions that can improve the management of parks and the protection of local ecosystems.

“Bees are vitally important insects that we need for the pollination services they provide, but in many cases, we still have a tenuous grasp of our own natural fauna and their role in the broader ecosystem,” Dr. Gibbs said.

Finding new species in the city is unusual, but it is more common with small insects than, say, vertebrates like birds or mammals. A new species of centipede called Nannarrup hoffmani was found in Central Park in 2002, and a cockroach thought to be new to science was found by two high school students in an apartment on the West Side in 2009.

It turns out that New York City is relatively rich in bees. More than 200 species of bee call the city home. This surprisingly robust biodiversity, Dr. Ascher said, is attributable in part to the city’s number of large parks and other ecologically rich areas like Jamaica Bay.

With the rapid and seemingly unstoppable decline in honeybees making headlines these days, the discovery of new bee species comes as a bit of welcome news. Dr. Gibbs said the discoveries highlight the vast opportunities to continue to discover all types of species using the new techniques.

“This study is really the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “If you consider that we are still finding species around one of the most well-studied metropolitan areas in North America, the prospect of finding new species in other parts of the country or other parts of the globe is just enormous.”