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This could be scary for most people, but scientists were delighted when a team of researchers recently discovered it in Indonesia.
It is the largest bee in the world, and scientists feared its extinction – until now.
A group of researchers performed a breathtaking "rediscovery" of the elusive creature and took the first photos and videos of a living giant Wallace bee on January 25th.
The team, composed of natural history photographer Clay Bolt, entomologist Eli Wyman, behavioral ecologist Simon Robson and ornithologist Glenn Chilton, spent years studying the bee and going through the Indonesian rainforest for days before finding one.
It is documented that only two other lucky fellows have already seen him in person before. The first was the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the giant bee in 1858 while exploring the Indonesian tropical island of Bacan. The entomologist Adam Messer became the second in 1981.
The team has gone from a nest of termites to a nest in the forests of the remote islands called the North Maluku, Bolt said.
Messer's paper gave them information about the habitat and behavior of the bee and examined satellite imagery to get acquainted with the terrain. They knew that Wallace's giant bee tended to be found in lowland forests and termite nests living in trees.
However, deforestation in Indonesia has accelerated over the past decade to pave the way for agriculture. This meant that the natural habitat of the bee had diminished – and with it the chances of seeing it.
They observed the nests for about half an hour before moving on to the next. Sometimes they thought they had met the giant bee, only to discover that it was a wasp, Bolt said.
On the last day of a 5-day area search, the guide and the team's interpreter spotted an interesting nest about 8 feet off the ground. When Bolt climbed onto a tree to take a closer look at the mound, he saw a giant bee, an isolated female.
"It was a remarkable and humbling moment," said Bolt. After recovering from the initial excitement, the team decided to photograph the bee in its natural environment.
They waited a few hours for her to come out of the nest, but she was shy like a camera.
Eventually, the researchers decided to tickle the bee with a piece of grass and it came out directly into a large tube. Once they got out of the tube, Bolt was able to capture the bee flying in front of the nest.
Robson, who studies the behavior and evolution of animals, said that the bee they observed "was not very aggressive".
Barely four years ago, Bolt and Wyman dreamed of seeing a giant Wallace bee in the wild.
The two men met while Bolt was shooting in New York. At the time, Wyman was working at the American Museum of Natural History and was proposing to show Bolt a giant Wallace bee specimen.
"Eli and I started talking," Would not it be cool to find that in nature? "Says Bolt.
So they started planning in three years. In October 2018, Robson and Chilton, who were in the same quest, made contact with them.
"We decided to join forces," Robson said. The first time they all met, it was at the Chicago Airport.
When the team arrived on its first site, they found that local residents had never seen what they were looking for, nor had they heard of it. They even spoke with a local ornithological guide, but found nothing.
"People could not believe we were looking for a bee," Bolt said.
Now that they have found it, Bolt hopes to work with local environmental advocates and potentially turn Wallace 's giant bee into a flagship species of the region.
"With all the bad news coming to us about things in the natural world, this (rediscovery) gives me hope," Bolt said.
Robson is optimistic that the bee will continue to thrive.
"There is still a lot of forest and there is time and good hope for the bee and its survival," Robson said.
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