A blue calamintha bee specimen is shown in spring 2020 in Florida.
Posted on 05/16/2020 8:16:28 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Insect researchers are buzzing in Florida this week over the rediscovery of the blue bee, a rare little creature thought to have gone extinct shortly after it was discovered.
Researchers in Florida say the blue calamintha bee (Osmia calaminthae) has been spotted for the first time since 2016, stoking hopes that it might be possible to save the insect from extinction.
Blue calamintha bees nest alone and feed on Ashe’s Calamint, a threatened plant found only in Florida. The bees were first recorded in 2011 and dropped out of sight a few years later, despite calls to protect their threatened habitat in central Florida.
Researcher Chase Kimmel ventured back to the patch of pine forest where the bee was first discovered to look for it this spring, just to see if it was still alive.
“I was open to the possibility that we may not find the bee at all,” Kimmel said in a release from the Florida Museum of Natural History, where he’s conducting his post-doctoral research.
“When we spotted it in the field it was really exciting,” Kimmel said.
Researchers at the museum have launched a two-year study to learn more about the bee’s numbers and habits, particularly since it can only be found in one tiny tract of forest.
They know that the bee nests alone but they’ve never actually found one of its nests. They’ve also learned that it likes to bob its head around on top of flowers to collect as much pollen as possible on its tiny hairs.
“We’re trying to fill in a lot of gaps that were not previously known,” Kimmel said. “There’s a lot of neat discoveries that can still occur.”
The bee is a hyper-local species that likely evolved around an isolated patch of sand dunes along the central Florida ridge, according to Jaret Daniels, Kimmel’s adviser at the museum. They hope to figure out exactly how many of the bees live in the area.
“Having this bee in more abundance than we expected is really encouraging for its survival,” Kimmel told Weather.com.
The two researchers are doing their best to work through the COVID-19 lockdowns so they can monitor the bee over the next year.
If nothing else, they hope their work will answer a key question for the critically threatened bee: is it to be, or not to be?
As usual I don’t even have to look at the poster.
I wonder if some of these newly discovered threatened species are just weird mutations that happen ever so often and when we see them again we think we spotted the previously discovered threatened species that we had thought went extinct. The really need to get good dna off these things.
You know genius when you see it.
If a bee is in the woods but you are not looking for it, does it exist?
lol
I’m watching Sanford and Son and they think LaMont has TB.
Their extreme overreactions are hysterical and are making me think about too much of the world right now :)
Look at all those bluebees!
I’d be blue too, if there were murder hornets on the way.
/rimshot
It’s the big one, Esther, I’m comin home
It’s the age old question “To bee or not to bee.”
Last week my daughter and I were watching Parks and Rec.
There are some episodes where the flu was going around.
Hilarious and very relevant.
those arent funny
but i call them their correct name, Giant Asian hornets
especially on pets rhey can easily kill them
and with people they leave permanent damage where tgey sting, because of tissue necrosis, you get these deep divits that dont go away
LOL The stupid drips like blue bee honey from that statement.
No doubt the researchers who came to that conclusion are heavily invested in GlobalClimateWarmingChange.
Gosh. Having so little faith in *possibility* must make your life rather boring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqZXPUDTmOc
https://abcbirds.org/bird/ivory-billed-woodpecker/
There’s no way for you to know that the poster of the thread is a personal friend and I was alluding to the fact that most offbeat non political threads are posted by him.
Now you do :)
And as an aside, I don’t give a #### what species of what animal or insect is still around or not.
PETA will never have me in their organization :)
This article about whether the Blue Bee is to be or not to be would be perfect for the Babylon Bee.
Great. Science kills one more bee just to take its picture.
Beengo!
Sounds like an evolutionary dead end, kind of like experts who know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing at all.
Now, now, don’t go picking on Nick. Sure, he’s a bit autistic, but he’s a fixture here and we have to take care of him. LOL!
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