Free Republic

A giant wasp-like insect with the face of a stag beetle was just re-discovered by a wildlife photographer on an unspecified island in Indonesia. The insect hadn’t been spotted since 1981 and was thought to be extinct for decades. The insect is known as Wallace’s giant bee, named after the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the winged insect in 1858. The giant black insect has immense jaws and looks like a stag beetle. It is the size of an adult thumb – four times larger than the European honeybee. The bee has a two and half inch wing...

THE WORLD’S LARGEST bee may also be the planet’s most elusive. First discovered in 1859 by the prominent scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, nobody could locate it again, and it was presumed extinct. But Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) was not gone. In 1981, an entomologist named Adam Messer searched and found it on three islands in Indonesia, on an archipelago called the North Moluccas. He collected a specimen and wrote about his discovery in 1984. Now, for the first time, it has been photographed and filmed alive in the wild, by a team including nature photographer Clay Bolt. Meanwhile, in...