Ross Conrad
The Asian Giant Hornet (Vespa mandarinia) has been in the news in recent years having made landfall in North America in late 2019. At 1.5 to two inches long, V. mandarinia is the world’s largest hornet. What most folks probably missed around the same time was news of the Giant Bee (Magachile Pluto). The giant bee is also known as the “Giant Mason Bee” or “Wallace’s Giant Bee” in recognition of Alfred Wallace who collected and identified the bee in 1858. Wallace’s bee was thought to be extinct until sightings of it were confirmed in 1981 after which sightings of this rare bee went unreported for over 35 years until 2018 when a specimen was sold on eBay. The following year a female giant bee living in a termite nest was filmed and photographed for the first time in the wild by Clay Bolt, an award winning natural history and conservation photographer who specializes in the bees of the world.
While the male giant bee only grows to 23mm (0.9 in) long, the female giant bee can reach 38mm (1.5 in) long and has a wingspan of 63.5mm (2.5 in) wide. M Pluto is believed to be the largest living bee species, dwarfing the world’s largest honey bee Apis Dorsata (aka the giant honey bee) which reaches a maximum of 17-20mm (0.7-0.8 in) long.
Wallace’s Giant Bee is a black resin bee with very large mandibles and a white band on its abdomen and all sightings have been limited to three islands in Indonesia: Bacan, Halmahera and Tidore. The giant bee protects itself from predators by building its nest in tree-dwelling termite mounds. Unlike honey bees that have to carry tree resins on their hind legs, the giant bee’s large mandibles assist with the gathering and transport of large balls of resin. The resin is used to build compartments inside the termite nest, sealing off the bee’s galleries from the termites. It is believed that the relationship of the bee with the termite may obligate, meaning that the bee may be entirely dependent on the tree-dwelling termites for its survival. Meanwhile, the expansion of palm oil plantations into much of the giant bee’s former habitat has caused the International Union for Conservation of Nature to label Magachile Pluto as vulnerable.
I had the opportunity to speak with Clay Bolt who told me how the film he produced about the Rusty Patch bumble bee called “A ghost in the making” and his work to get the Rusty Patch bumble bee listed on the endangered species list led to a new friendship with an entomologist which in turn led to his effort to rediscover Wallace’s giant bee. “…When I was doing work on the Rusty Patch in 2015 I met this guy Eli Wyman, a good friend of mine now, at the Museum of Natural History in New York where he was working, and he showed me a specimen of Wallace’s giant bee that had been collected in 1981… Eli and I sort of fantasized about rediscovering it, and certainly as a photographer I would love to take the first photos of a living Wallace’s giant bee. But there wasn’t really any urgency at the time because it hadn’t been seen in so long, but we started to do some work to figure out if we could find it, where the best place would be to find it, and that sort of thing.”
It was while Eli and Clay were working on this idea of finding the giant bee that a specimen showed up on eBay. As Clay remembers, “…when it sold on eBay, at one point the bidding went up to $39,000, then the bid dropped much lower and we think it was somebody bidding against themselves trying to raise the price. It ended up selling for $9,000. That set off alarm bells for me in particular, because for me $9,000 is a lot, but when you’re in that part of the world that’s a tremendous amount of money, more than some people make in years. So, I was concerned because this bee lives in these boreal termite mounds that somebody could just go through and cut down every tree with a termite mound looking for the bee and sell them. At that point we felt this urgency to look for the bee and that’s kind of why we ended up going and searching for it in 2019.”
After Clay’s 2019 trip, more specimens of the giant bee showed up on eBay and this seemed to confirm his worst fears. “One of the things I worried about before I went was if we rediscover it and we publicize it, it’s a gamble because it means it is going to draw more attention to it, but I was under the mindset that because people are willing to pay this much money for it, the bee’s either going to go extinct in obscurity and darkness or we are going to shine a light on the issue to try and fix it. That was a gamble that we decided to take.” Bolt continues, “I immediately went to some connections I had in the Indonesian government and was like, this is a really special species you have, can you do anything to protect it? Through our experience and a presentation we gave, there was a lot of knowledge about birds in particular, but there wasn’t a lot of focus on protecting insects, even though everybody had heard of Wallace, there was not a lot of familiarity with the bee. There was certainly a lot of fame especially because of Alfred Russell Wallace’s travels and some of the amazing butterflies they have there like the bird wing butterfly, but there wasn’t this general information or knowledge base about the bee even though it’s super large. So basically, that meant that the government was like, we want to do something, but we have to put together this task force and all this kind of stuff. It was moving super slowly, and I was trying to feed information back to the government through contacts I had and it wasn’t working so it occurred to me that if that wasn’t going to be the route that we went then we would need to figure out something else, so the best we could do then was cut off the market.”
As Bolt explains it, people who collect bee specimens from the forest will reach out to others who sell the bees for them, and while in search of a buyer, these sellers use private messaging through social media to find known insect collectors. “Luckily one particular person reached out to me and said ‘I don’t think this is right’ and so he agreed to remain anonymous and kind of stay undercover and feed me information about who was approaching him, so I was able to gather information on some of the sellers and I took this to an organization called Traffic that regulates the trafficking of animals on the world’s leading platforms like Facebook, eBay and Instagram. There are similar companies in China and Japan and other places, and there’s a coalition of these companies that work with Traffic. So what ultimately ended up happening was I was able to get a set of guidelines from the Indonesian government which I gave to Traffic, and Traffic created a new rule for newly discovered or rediscovered species of plants, insects and other things that don’t have formal protection. If those insects are flagged, they would no longer allow them to be sold if there was a risk, for example of species rarity and so that was a huge step forward. It took a while but that new rule in essence meant that anytime someone put the bee up online, it would be taken down immediately. The bee has popped up a couple times since then and just recently, as late last year, someone in California had about ten specimens they were selling for pretty cheap. They were in pretty bad condition, some of them had not fully emerged and you could tell that someone had ripped apart a nest…Because it was being sold from the U.S., Traffic was able to contact the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and that has pretty much shut down everything online.

Wallace’s Giant Bee is about four times the size of a honey bee worker. Photo Credit: ©Clay Bolt / claybolt.com
“What was really interesting is that through this whole process, another contact reached out to me and it turns out that within Indonesia, there is a law that I think was developed in the late 90’s or early 2000’s that says basically no organism can be collected from Indonesia for sale unless the population has been analyzed and a quota has been set to ensure the species won’t be over collected… So while going in search of the bee was a gamble, by bringing all of this up and sort of creating this conversation, we were able to essentially bring to life protections that we didn’t know existed beforehand.”
Thanks in part to Bolt’s efforts, there is now an increased awareness in the conservation agency of Indonesia’s North Maluku to try and preserve the giant bee. “I am hopeful now that the bee has a future separate from just being collected and of course people can sell them individually through underground channels but because that part of the world is quite remote, and because it is harder to sell the species now, it makes it a lot more difficult for people to traffic them.”
What’s next for Clay Bolt? “Right now I am working on a guide to the Bumblebees of the Americas which has never been done, so I am going to be travelling from the Arctic all the way down to the tip of Tierra La Fuego in South America over the next few years putting together this project. I’m excited about it because I think through education and creating more awareness, people will have a better sense of what’s out there and by learning that I hope that people learn how to care for them and provide better protection for the bees. I’ve always loved connecting with these little creatures that are amazing and beautiful and quite frankly, need our help right now.”
Ross Conrad lives in Middlebury, Vermont and is the author of Natural Beekeeping, Revised and Expanded 2nd edition, and The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.