A brand new species of metallic blue bee, discovered thus far in Texas and Oklahoma, was lately found by researchers.
The bee, referred to as Andrena androfovea, is a part of a household of bees generally known as mining bees for his or her solitary way of life — not like the social honey bee — and underground nests. However, within the new research detailing the bee’s discovery, the researchers word that Andrena androfovea seems to be a brand new department of the mining bee household, with a peculiar penchant for nightshade vegetation.
“The technique of documenting bee biodiversity began centuries in the past, however scientists are nonetheless discovering new species on a regular basis,” James Hung, an assistant professor of biology on the University of Oklahoma who co-authored the paper, mentioned in a press launch.
Andrena androfovea was first discovered within the late Nineteen Eighties by entomologist Jack Neff of the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin. Neff, one other co-author of the research, caught the bee close to the Texas-Mexico border whereas it was pollinating flowers of the purple groundcherry, a part of the nightshade household.
Mining bees are likely to keep away from nightshades, so seeing one cozying as much as them was a curious sight. It wasn’t till over three many years later when Neff met Hung and Silas Bossert, an evolutionary biologist at Washington State University, that the trio found the nightshade-loving bee was a brand new species within the Andrena household.
“This new species, nonetheless, is so distantly associated to another Andrena that we predict it has shaped its personal department on the Andrena household tree about 12.6 million years in the past,” Bossert, the research’s lead writer, mentioned within the press launch. “We know this as a result of we sequenced and in contrast its genome to these of different bees. Using a method referred to as ‘molecular clock’, we will approximate how a lot time has handed since this lineage has separated from the opposite bees primarily based on variations in its genome.”
Hung defined the identification of Andrena androfovea went unknown as a result of new bee species are sometimes in comparison with museum specimens and don’t essentially endure genetic evaluation.
In addition to doing the genetic evaluation, the researchers noticed the bee’s foraging and pollinating habits, which was totally different from different mining bees.
“I noticed this matte-blue-colored bee doing a handstand on the flower, sucking nectar with its tongue whereas scraping the flower with its hind legs and rubbing the flower with its bushy stomach,” Hung mentioned within the launch. “This is fairly uncommon habits for a member of the mining bee genus and actually helps us showcase the distinctive evolutionary improvements of this new subgenus.”
In an electronic mail to The Dallas Morning News, Bossert mentioned whereas the researchers collected bees from websites in southwestern Oklahoma and southern, western and central Texas, it stays to be seen whether or not Andrena androfovea lives within the Dallas-Fort Worth space.
“I’d assume that it may very effectively be round there, we’ve simply not seemed there but,” Bossert wrote. Because the bees appear to gather pollen from wild floor cherries and Chamaesaracha, a perennial herb generally generally known as 5 eyes, he added, “these vegetation very probably must be current to ensure that the bee to have the ability to survive.”
Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial selections.
