New ‘little blue bee’ species discovered in Texas and Oklahoma

A new bee species has recently been discovered, found only in Texas and Oklahoma. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma published a study in the journal Ecology and Evolution identifying the bee, naming it Andrena androfovea.

Paper coauthor James Hung, an assistant professor of biology at OU who runs the university’s Pollinator Ecology Lab, joined Texas Standard with details about the discovery.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: What led to the discovery of this species?

James Hung: Well, so it’s really just people going out there and documenting biodiversity in our respective areas of expertise. So this story actually goes way back.

Our senior author on this study, Dr. Jack Neff, has been the Texas bee guru for decades now, and he was the first one to have observed it many, many years ago, back before the turn of the millennium, actually.

And he had recognized pretty early on that this was a species that had not yet been formally introduced to science – him being one of a very small handful of people who have ever seen it anywhere.

But it wasn’t until more recently that we put all the pieces together to give a more comprehensive picture of where this species fits in the general genealogy of the genus Andrena and how it lives its life.

I’m always surprised to learn that discovering new species is a fairly regular occurrence for scientists. But this discovery is unique. There’s some really rare characteristics about this bee in particular. Can you tell me what makes it special?

Yeah. So it’s got two main things going for it that makes it really unique among members of the Andrena genus. Now, this is the second largest genus of bees in the world, so it’s very, very diverse. It’s very widespread. And Andrena androfovea, our new little blue bee, has two special characteristics.

First is that the males have a fovea, or rather a pair of fovea, one inside each eye. And the fovea is a fuzzy structure that you can almost think of as eyeliners. They seem to serve presumably similar functions as human eyeliners do: to signal our attractiveness to the opposite gender.

Now in almost all other Andrena species, with very, very few notable exceptions, only the females have these foveas. And that’s why our bee is special, because in our species the males have foveas as well.

And that’s why we named this bee androfovea as its species name, with “andro” meaning “male” in Greek. So if you were to colloquialise its name into modern-day slang, it might be, you know, “eyeliner boy.”

The other unique thing about this species among all its Andrena brothers and sisters and cousins is that it seems to only collect pollen from a couple of members of the nightshade family, namely these two closely related ground cherry genera, Quincula and Chamaesaracha.

And as far as we know, out of the I think something like 1,500 or 1,700 species of Andrena in the world, many of them are picky eaters that only collect pollen from either one plant species or one plant genus or several closely related genera in a single plant family.

But so far we know of no other Andrena that is a picky pollen eater of members of the nightshade family. So that’s a pretty special and unique evolutionary innovation that this species has decided to take on for itself.

I want to read a quote of yours from a press release related to this discovery: “I observed this matte-blue-colored bee doing a handstand on the flower, sucking nectar with its tongue while scraping the flower with its hind legs and rubbing the flower with its hairy belly.”

For one, that sounds pretty acrobatic, and a very interesting position to see a bee in. But I mean, why did that clue you in to the fact that this is something different than we’ve seen before?

I think for one, the fact that you very, very rarely see Andrena bees foraging on flowers of any kind of nightshade – that is already a big surprise to me.

Many members of the nightshade family have pollen that’s not very easy to access. And therefore, a lot of the bees that forage on nightshades have to have these morphological modifications on their bodies to be able to get pollen efficiently out of these flowers of members of the nightshade family.

And many of these species of nightshade flowers also require buzz pollination. This is where a bee will land in the flower and zap the flower with a sonic blast by vibrating its flight muscles without actually flapping its wings. It’s like when you take electric toothbrush and dip it into a bowl of flour and see the flour grains fly up into the air. The bees are basically doing that.

So for an Andrena species, which is not known to be able to use buzz pollination, to visit a member of the nightshade family was pretty unusual for us to observe.

Now, one interesting thing is seeing the hairy belly of this bee and the fact that it foraged members of the nightshade family, we had thought, ooh we may have the very first buzz pollinating Andrena on our hands. But after careful observation and analyzing the video, it seems that instead of using buzz pollination, it just uses some very clever and efficient kind of scraping techniques to get the pollen out of the anthers and load it onto the pollen-collecting baskets on its body.

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This is really interesting stuff, and I can understand for sure why, and an entomologist, somebody who studies pollinators, would be really interested in your work. But what about somebody who doesn’t have their day-to-day deal with bugs? Why is the discovery of this bee and the discovery of new species like this important for everybody?

Well, I’m going to quote a famous philosopher, and I do not remember his name off the top of my head. But he said, “in the end, we only protect what we love, and we only love what we know.”

There are so many species out there that still remain completely unknown. They’re in the unknown unknown category, as in we don’t even know that they exist out there.

And among the species that we know of, many of them we only know their name and a few scattered locations where they are found – potentially maybe what flowers they’ve been collected on or what leaves they’ve been found chewing on – and very little else.

So what we did here is we’ve taken Andrena androfovea from an unknown unknown into a species that’s closer to a known entity, but still yet with many unknowns. We don’t know where it makes its nest. We know that it is associated with short grass, prairie kind of dry sandy clay, soil habitats, but we don’t know where else it is found.

We don’t know how big their population sizes are. We don’t know if there are any other plants in the nightshade family that they can forage for pollen on.

So there’s still so much to know about the natural world. And it is only by going out and documenting these new species can we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of how nature works to sustain all the life that we know on Earth.

And also, you may know this already, but we are kind of in a biodiversity crisis. A lot of species and ecosystems and ecological interactions among species are being lost at a super alarming rate. And as a result, we really need to start and complete the cataloging of what’s out there so that we know, you know, what priceless works of art to to ship out of these burning and collapsing biodiversity museums that is our natural world, if I may use this metaphor.

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