First it reappeared as a commodity. A species that many considered lost, seen very few times since the 19th century, has ended up on eBay with a collector’s price: almost 10 thousand dollars for a dead and preserved specimen. The animal was Wallace’s giant bee, scientific name Megachile plutothe largest known bee in the world. A huge presence by insect standards, fragile by everything else.
It lives in the northern Moluccas, in Indonesia, within a geography of tropical forests, remote islands, termite mounds in trees and plant resin. The female can reach about 5 centimeters in length and 6 centimeters in wingspan. It has large, dark, strong mandibles, almost like those of a small tool. It uses them to cut, collect and manipulate resin, an essential material for building the nest.
A house inside the termite mound
Wallace’s giant bee has very particular habits. It builds its nest inside active termite mounds, obtaining galleries and cells which it then covers with a thick layer of resin. That substance works as a physical barrier against termites and as a natural defense against fungi and bacteria, with a role reminiscent of that of propolis in common bees.
Its rarity also arises from here. To live it needs a precise fit: forest, suitable trees, available resin, termite mounds in the right place, climate and habitat still fairly intact. If one of these elements is lost, the entire balance becomes thinner. This is why such a large insect can remain invisible for decades. Even many people who inhabit those islands were unaware of its existence.
The scientific history of the bee begins in 1859, when Alfred Russel Wallace spotted it during his trip to the Malay archipelago. Wallace was the same naturalist who, through independent paths, came to formulate the theory of natural selection, later presented together with the works of Charles Darwin.
His letter, which left from Ternate, in the Moluccas, contributed to accelerating one of the most profound turning points in modern biology: the idea that species change over time and that human beings are also part of the same natural history as other living beings. The bee collected by Wallace thus entered a double archive: that of insects and that of great scientific revolutions. Then it almost disappeared completely.
The return of the ghost
After the nineteenth-century discovery, trace of the giant bee was lost for more than a century. In 1981 an American expedition managed to find it in some islands of the northern Moluccas and study it for a period. Then came another long silence. The species was considered by many to be extinct or in any case so rare that it now seemed beyond the reach of research.
In 2018 the story took a disturbing turn: a specimen appeared for sale online. That passage demonstrated two things together. The bee, in all likelihood, still existed. And someone had already understood that its rarity could become money. For such a vulnerable species, the collectors’ market represents a further threat, because it transforms survival into the hunt for a rare piece.
In 2019, an expedition finally managed to photograph a live female in her nest. The work of the entomologist Enzo Moretto, director of the Esapolis insect museum, also started from there, who reached the Moluccas with Davide Apolloni and Fabrizio D’Aloia. The group followed local reports, searched for compatible termite mounds, crossed the forest in the rainy season and found traces of the bee in both Halmahera and Morotai.
Abandoned nests, cocoons, remains, a dead specimen. Then the live specimens. The bees were filmed collecting resin and working on the nest. Moretto also managed to draw them live, on site, illuminated by an LED flashlight. An almost nineteenth-century gesture within a contemporary expedition: observing, stopping, giving shape to an animal that science had been chasing for decades.
The forest decides everything
News of the survival of Wallace’s giant bee brings with it immediate caution. The species still exists, however its habitat continues to shrink. Mining, deforestation, urbanization and land transformation are affecting the very forests on which resin trees, termite mounds and the entire reproductive cycle of the bee depend.
Here the wonder does not last long. An insect can reappear after a century, it can end up in photographs, in museums, in the stories of naturalists, even in television programs and popular books. Then the more concrete problem remains: leaving him a home. Without a forest, the giant bee becomes just a Latin name, a rare photo, an absurd price on a screen.
Moretto told this and other stories in the volume Naturalist’s diarydedicated to travel, discoveries and encounters with the world of insects and other often ignored small animals. Wallace’s bee, however, remains a special creature. It brings together evolution, exploration, adventure literature, the rarity market and the biodiversity crisis. It’s big enough to look like something out of a novel. It’s fragile enough to actually disappear.
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