Since the “Save the Bees” campaign gained national traction in the 1990s, scientists have made significant strides in conserving vulnerable bee species — and cataloged startling new discoveries along the way.
Among new species of honeybees, leaf-cutting bees, and ground-nesting bees, one peculiar species from the miner bee family stands apart from the rest: the Andrena androfovea.
And that’s because the name of this sparkly, metallic blue-green bee species essentially boils down to the nickname “eyeliner boy.”
In a paper for Ecology and Evolution, researchers at the University of Oklahoma identified the bee, breaking down everything from the bee’s genome sequencing to its favorite flowers.
In a new interview with the Texas Standard, paper co-author James Hung said that the bee was first sighted years ago.
Still, it took over three decades to collect data and “formally introduce” the species to scientific record.
“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,” Hung explained.
“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.”
Hung, who is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, said that the new “little blue bee” — which is native to Texas and Oklahoma — 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,” Hung noted.
“They seem to serve presumably similar functions as human eyeliners do: to signal our attractiveness to the opposite gender.”
So what sets this new bee apart from the rest? Male Andrena very rarely have foveas like their female counterparts.
“And that’s why we named this bee androfovea as its species name, with ‘andro’ meaning ‘male’ in Greek,” Hung reasoned.
“So if you were to colloquialise its name into modern-day slang, it might be, you know, ‘eyeliner boy.’”
Another notable characteristic of the Andrena androfovea, Hung pointed out, was their peculiar pollen-collecting behavior.
“[They] only collect pollen from a couple of members of the nightshade family,” he said.
Most animals, like deer and sheep, typically avoid nightshade flowers, which contain a toxic principle called solanine which can compromise an animal's gastrointestinal and nervous systems — but select bees and butterflies have been documented pollinating them to no ill effect.
And when it comes to pollinating nightshade, the “eyeliner boy” bees are the “black sheep” of their family.
“And as far as we know, out of the, I think, something like 1,500 or 1,700 species of Andrena in the world … we know of no other Andrena that is a picky pollen eater of members of the nightshade family,” Hung said.
“So that’s a pretty special and unique evolutionary innovation that this species has decided to take on for itself.”
Bee species discoveries highlight the numerous ways that bees better our planet — and the Andrena androfovea is no exception.
For instance, miner bees are smaller than bumblebees by a matter of milimeters, but despite their small stature, they have a huge impact on the environment.
As both pollinators and burrowers, the Andrena androfovea are pivotal to cross pollination and soil aeration, maintaining good soil health and helping local habitats bloom.
In his interview, Hung celebrated the little blue bee species for joining the annals of scientific history — and said that there was still so much left to discover.
Evoking the words of Senegalese engineer and forest scientist Baba Dioum, Hung 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,” Hung said. “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.”
Header image via Professor James Hung
