Bolt had read Wallace’s journals, and knew the legend of the giant bee well. So when entomologist Eli Wyman was showing him around the collections of the American Museum of Natural History in 2015 and offered to get out a specimen, Bolt didn’t hesitate. “I was immediately enamored of it,” he says. “From that moment, we really began to hatch a plan to see if we could be the ones to find it and rediscover it, because it's just so rare and beautiful.”

That would make them an extreme rarity: a scientific team catching sight of the giant bee alive. After Wallace, the second to study the species in the field was an entomologist named Adam Messer. In 1981, he observed the bizarre resin-gathering excursions of Wallace’s giant bee, which in addition to its huge mandibles uses a part of the mouth called a labrum to harvest the stuff from a tree.

“Facing upward,” Messer writes, “a female loosened resin with the mandibles, then scraped it up using the elongate labrum in the manner of a bulldozer blade. The ball of resin which formed was held in place between the tree and the labrum while being progressively enlarged.” The female would then take it back to her nest, along with wood fibers, to waterproof the tunnel walls.

The resin may also help explain why Wallace’s giant bee evolved to be so giant. In addition to waterproofing the tunnels, the sticky resin may help keep the termites out. “She's strong enough to actually power through that without getting stuck,” says Bolt, “whereas the little termites would definitely get stuck if they tried to penetrate.”

The evolutionary story of this mysterious species, though, is far from resolved, as is the question of the bee’s sociality. Messer found several females living in one termite nest, but the species has nowhere near the sophisticated society of a honeybee. Which is fine, really: The majority of bee species are solitary, so honeybees are the outliers here.

Out of concern for the state of the species’ population, Bolt left his specimen in the wild. Poachers would not be so sensitive, which is why he’s keeping the bee’s location a secret. “I felt an incredible responsibility because by saying that this creature does exist, it means that people could try to go in search for it,” Bolt says. “So that's why I immediately began talking to authorities and locals in Indonesia to try to figure out a way to help protect it.”

News of the rediscovery comes just a week after an alarming report cataloged huge declines in insect populations. The simultaneously horrible and reassuring truth is that while insects won’t altogether vanish from the face of the Earth, some are suffering more than others. Pollinating species are falling victim to pesticides, but other species will inevitably adapt to a warmer and generally less hospitable planet.

“In a time of biodiversity declines, including for insects, this rediscovery gives us hope that not all is lost and that we have managed to protect not only an amazing bee, but importantly also the unique habitat that is its, and likely many other rare species', home,” says Cornell University entomologist Corrie Moreau, who wasn’t involved in this new work.

The challenge is that protecting species like Wallace’s giant bee requires understanding them. It means sending people like Bolt into inhospitable spots for days on end, and it means using what we’ve learned to inform how we protect vulnerable species. It entails identifying vulnerable habitats and protecting them at all costs.