The World's Largest Bee and the Cautionary Tale of Its Rediscovery

This piece was originally published in Undark and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. While working as a curatorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History, Eli Wyman learned about a very unusual bee that was presumed to be extinct. The bee, Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, is a massive unit. It is the largest bee in the world, four times larger than a honeybee and measuring about the length of a human thumb. Huge mandibles hang like dastardly garden shears from its…

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