New Iridescent Bee Species Island-Hopping in Polynesia
Back in the 1930s, a scientist named Elwood Zimmerman found three very small, pretty bees on tahetahe flowers in Polynesia. People were amazed because these bees were so far away from other bees, like in Hawai’i and Australia. After almost 60 years, scientists finally figured out how these bees got there, using long-handled nets.
Those original three little bees were kept in a museum until 1965 when a bee expert named Professor Charles Michener named them Tuamotu’s masked bee. After that, no one saw these bees again, and some worried they might be gone forever. But recently, scientists found eight new kinds of bees related to them, between 2014 and 2019.
Six of these new bees were found in Fiji, one in Polynesia, and one in Micronesia. Scientists looked at their features and DNA to tell them apart and found out that these bees in the South Pacific were never seen before.
Dr. James Dorey, who led the study, said they found these new bees by looking in the treetops, which they hadn’t done before. Before, they only looked at flowers on the ground.
Fiji
Dorey said, “We only found our mysterious little bees when we used really long nets in Fiji and searched in the trees. It’s no wonder if ‘Hylaeus’ means ‘from the forest’.”
The team thinks the bees probably couldn’t fly all the way from Hawai’i to Polynesia at once. They believe there might be more bee species in the many small islands between them, especially now that they know where to look. They suggest that future research trips focus on searching in the treetops to find more bee species that were missed before. This discovery helps solve the mystery of how the bees ended up on these distant islands.
Dorey added, “These bees help us solve the mystery: the ancestors of H. tuamotuensis made their way to French Polynesia by hopping between islands, starting from Fiji and the southwest Pacific!”
The team also thinks that strong weather might have spread the bees to different islands. “Since most masked bees make their nests in wood, they could have floated between islands, especially during tropical cyclones when lots of plants get washed into the sea. They might have also been carried by strong winds, but that would have been a risky journey for our tiny bees,” said Dorey.
One of the new species got named veli’s Hylaeus, referring to the powerful veli from Fijian stories who are connected to the forest.
“The name is a reminder to protect these new forest-specialist species and their trees,” the authors emphasized.
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