A giant bee thought lost to the world for decades has been found again on an Indonesian island.

The black bee is the size of a human thumb, with a wingspan of 6 centimetres and fierce-looking mandibles. A lone specimen was rediscovered by Simon Robson of the University of Sydney and his colleagues. “She just came and looked around and went back to her nest,” he says.

Megachile pluto is also known as Wallace’s Giant Bee, named after the English entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Charles Darwin, is credited with developing the theory of evolution through natural selection.

Wallace discovered the bee in 1859 while exploring the tropical Indonesian island of Bacan. He described it as “a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle”. In 1860, an entomologist in the UK determined it was actually a bee, saying it was a “giant of the genus to which it belongs”.


Megachile pluto is approximately four times the size of a European honeybee Clay Bolt/claybolt.com

The bee has a history of disappearing. It was believed to be extinct until its accidental rediscovery by a US forester in Indonesia in 1981, but the lack of another sighting led the Global Wildlife Conservation to include it on their “25 most wanted” lost species list in 2017.

Robson’s team found the bee in a termite’s mound a few metres off the ground while searching on one of Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands.

“We ran around cheering and shouting and hugging each other,” he says. “After all these years, and all the people who tried to find it, it was still alive.”