
World's largest bee ‘rediscovered’ after 38 years - sohkamyung
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/february/the-worlds-largest-bee-rediscovered-after-38-years.html
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robotmay
Alfred Russell Wallace, the namesake of this bee, was a very interesting
character and largely forgotten next to Charles Darwin. There's a rather great
documentary with comedian/naturalist Bill Bailey that I would recommend
watching if you're interested in this area of the world and Wallace's history:
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2968430/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2968430/)

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pbhjpbhj
Specimens sold to collectors for several thousand pounds, don't think they're
going to survive long unless some enterprising "poacher" breeds them.

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thaumasiotes
I wouldn't bet on a thick order book.

The first one sold for 7,000 pounds; the second one sold for 3,200. Continuing
that trend would mean an infinite number of bees would sell for less than
14,000 pounds total.

There just aren't that many rich bee collectors.

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pbhjpbhj
Well let's say there's one hive, would someone sell 7000 bees -- the price
floor appears to be £6-8 (based on pinned stag beetle price on eBay).

So, I reckon someone could get a minimum of £7k for collecting the hive. No
need to collect infinite bees!

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thaumasiotes
Absolutely wrong. The fact that stag beetles never trade below 6 pounds on
eBay does not indicate that you can sell as many as you want at that price. It
indicates that nobody finds it worth their time to make sales at a lower
price. How many of those sales actually occur in, say, a 12-month window?

If you have 7,000 dead bees, you can try to sell them for 1 pound each, but
you'll quickly run through everyone who wants one and be stuck with a bunch of
leftover bees.

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thaumasiotes
> Wallace's giant bee (Megachile pluto), which can reach four times the size
> of a honeybee

Something is weird. They head the article with a big image captioned
"Wallace's giant bee in comparison with a honeybee"; it shows the honeybee as
being much less than a quarter the size of the giant bee.

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peteradio
It looks about 4 times its length.

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thaumasiotes
By that argument, the White House is 90% of the size of the Empire State
Building.

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peteradio
Think thats a pretty typical way of describing animals though, by a single
dimension, rather than volume. If the ESB and WH were animals you'd naturally
compare heights rather than widths.

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droithomme
It's very interesting how this bee relies on termite mounds to live in and
specific kinds of tree resin to build termite free sections. Since there's a
finite number of termite mounds on the couple islands it lives on there's not
many of these bees in the world, nor will there ever be. Also interesting that
the bees, being near extinct, are worth a lot of money to collectors at
auctions, and that the people who live on this island have very few sources of
outside income.

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Dumble
Thanks, I hate it. :)

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Numberwang
Don't worry, we will soon have it killed off along with the rest of the
insects.

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goatlover
Do you really think we can create a greater extinction event than the ones the
insects have survived? And yes, that includes some serious climate changes.

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PakG1
All-out nuclear war?

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dsfyu404ed
A nuclear war can only be fought to the point where nobody has the capacity to
keep fighting. You can't actually obliterate the planet. The global climate
would be altered but it wouldn't be close to the worst the earth has seen.
Insects, plants, rodents, and humans will all almost certainly survive a
nuclear war. Animals in the wild are largely unaffected by high levels of
background radiation because they don't live long enough for that to be what
kills them and they reproduce before that anyway.

Nuclear war would suck for people but life on earth and a lot of the life on
it would be just fine.

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Reason077
AI could keep fighting, and replicating more weapons, long after humans are
dead.

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goatlover
You mean futuristic AI, like Skynet?

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chiefalchemist
What is it about this particular environment that allows this mutation (i.e.,
larger in size) to survive here, but no where else in the world?

Also, in theory, could it be even larger, or is there some limit to how large
a bee could be?

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nicoburns
Insect size tends to be limited by oxygen availabiltiy (since they don't have
lungs, and must absorb oxygen passively). Hence why the biggest insects are
found in oxygen rich rainforests.

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BurningFrog
I know insects used to be much bigger when the atmosphere had more oxygen.

But I'm _very_ skeptical that there is more oxygen in rain forests. For one
thing, I don't think they actually produce more oxygen than they consume,
since there is an equilibrium of plant mass being created and being consumed.
Also, the planet is quite windy.

Still, I'm interested in seeing any evidence to the contrary!

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DigitalVerse
Alternate title: "Bee finally declared winner of world's longest running game
of hide and seek!"

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vbuwivbiu
"38 year old bee loses game of hide and seek"

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simplecomplex
Here in Northern California there’s Carpenter bees that big. I see them all
the time...

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angel_j
I've seen carpenter bees in California as big as that.

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paulpauper
it would probably hurt like hell to be stung by it

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gorkemcetin
And its size is comparable to a domestic pussycat.

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bitwize
Ohhh, you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the Asian giant hornet.
Nearly two inches long, with a quarter-inch-long stinger that's gauranteed to
cause immense pain, and may kill you even if you're not allergic. These
insects are as vicious as they are huge. If just one invades a honeybee hive,
it turns the hive into an insect-scale scene from _Attack on Titan_ , forcing
its way in through the entrance, slaughtering bees left and right with one
snip from its mandibles. European honeybees have no defense, but Japanese
honeybees can defeat a single hornet by surrounding it with a ball of bees
which vibrate their wings until the hornet overheats and dies -- and even then
many bees inside the ball will be lost. If the single scout hornet makes it
out alive, it will return -- with friends. Even a hive of tens of thousands of
bees cannot mount an effective defense against just a few hornets, and the
hornets will lay waste to the colony in a matter of hours.

Nature is a merciless bitch, and some of her creatures are downright
horrifying.

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skellera
This video amazed me when I first saw it. (I hope there’s a better quality one
out there)

[https://youtu.be/JDSf3Kshq1M](https://youtu.be/JDSf3Kshq1M)

It’s just amazing how much stronger the hornets are.

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huffmsa
I fully expected this to be a resident of The Land of Misfit Animals, AKA
Australia.

Quite surprised it's not. Indonesia is close enough that it might have escaped
it's confines, though.

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jamiethompson
Where was he hiding?

