In 1965, famend bee biologist Charles Michener described a brand new species of masked bee from “a wholly sudden area,” the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. Michener named the bee Hylaeus tuamotuensis and famous that its nearest family reside in New Zealand — some 3,000 miles away throughout the Pacific Ocean. How did a small bee make such a giant journey?
It seems that the reply was buzzing above scientists’ heads all alongside. By swinging insect nets excessive up within the timber, researchers found eight species of Hylaeus bees that had by no means been described earlier than, together with six that reside in Fiji.
The island nation lies between French Polynesia and Australia, the place Hylaeus range is highest, so the scientists suspect that the ancestors of H. tuamotuensis reached their distant dwelling by island-hopping throughout the Pacific. As particular person bees moved from island to island, they steadily developed into separate species, researchers report February 26 in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
The island lifetime of bees
Most bee species reside in arid areas just like the southwestern United States, says bee biologist Bryan Danforth of Cornell College, who was suggested by the late Michener for his Ph.D. “We don’t consider bees as being terribly numerous in islands.”
Bee searchers often snag their quarry by sweeping nets low to the bottom. However throughout a visit to Fiji in 2019, evolutionary biologist James Dorey of Wollongong College in Australia took a special strategy. He knew that some bees in Australia are likely to fly within the cover of eucalypt timber, or gum timber, and thought bees in Fiji would possibly do the identical. He geared up himself with an extended web and began swinging it skyward.
“As quickly as I used to be in a position to pattern a flowering tree, we had been catching Hylaeus,” Dorey says. “It was clear that we had a couple of [new] species from that one tree.”
Looking for bees in treetops is comparatively uncommon. However “we’re beginning to notice that, truly, there’s plenty of bee range up there,” Danforth says.
Dorey and his collaborators have a powerful relationship with native Fijians, particularly in Navai Village on the principle island of Viti Levu, and with Fijian scientists like coauthor Marika Tuiwawa, a botanist on the College of the South Pacific. There’s plenty of enthusiasm amongst Fijians for his or her native bees, Dorey says, and he hopes to coach college students there in bee amassing. Specialists on Fiji’s bees, he says, needs to be Fijian.
Whereas it’s clear that H. tuamotuensis is just not alone in its distant island dwelling, many mysteries stay: How did Hylaeus bees make it to the varied islands and what path did they take?
It’s potential the bees had been blown throughout the Pacific by storms, Danforth says, however he additionally thinks that their behavior of nesting in wooden might have one thing to do with the bees’ unfold. “For those who nest in wooden and a bit of wooden falls within the ocean, and that drifts hundreds of kilometers and lands on a liveable spot, that’s a believable manner for these bees to disperse,” he says. “We all know that different wood-nesting bees have completed that.”
