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This content is based on a post originally published on January 25, 2012, on my blog “Pollinators Info” (no longer online).
Bees come in an impressive range of sizes
Read about the world’s smallest and largest here…
Perdita minima is the world’s smallest bee, measuring only 0.08″ (2mm) in length! One of these bees would not even cover the entire length of one antenna from the world’s largest bee! This species is only found in the Sonoran Desert, in North America. These tiny bees are solitary; each female builds her own tunnel nest in the ground to lay her eggs.
Perdita minima is the primary pollinator of tiny flowers like sandmats, in the family Euphorbiaceae. Many species in the genus Perdita are specialist pollinators, but their small size has made discovery of their life history challenging. The featured image from Stephen Buchman (Look for my podcast interview with him in another post) shows one of these tiny bees next to the head of a carpenter bee (Xylocopa).
Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, was discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, in Indonesia. (The genus was first called Chalicodoma). Females are about 1.5″ long (~39mm), with a wingspan of 2.5″ (63mm), earning this bee the title of largest in the world!
The bee in this photo is a female, identified as such by her enormous mandibles. Males are smaller and don’t have these monstrous jaws. The bee’s ecology is fascinating- females dig nest tunnels into arboreal termite nests!
Image copyright Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, October 5, 2023. CC BY 4.0.
They then line their tunnels with a mixture of resin and wood, which protects their developing brood from the termites. The female uses her mandibles and enlarged labrum (another part of the “mouth” area) to pry dried resin off of the bark of trees and hold it during transport back to her nest. Females also appear to nest communally, which means that they share an entrance, but each female makes her own off-shoot tunnels and lays her own eggs.
Wallace’s giant bee was thought extinct until the early 1980s, when it was rediscovered by Adam C. Messer. Females supply their offspring with pollen and nectar from a variety of plants, especially those in the family Myrtaceae (myrtles, clove, eucalyptus, etc.). The threatened status of Wallace’s giant is unknown, because there’s still so much we don’t know about it in general!
Read Messer’s article describing his rediscovery of Wallace’s giant here: Chalicodoma pluto: The World’s Largest Bee Rediscovered Living Communally in Termite Nests.
Have you been fortunate enough to see either of these bees? Tell us about them in the comments section so we can learn from you!
Featured image in public domain, by Stephen Buchman.
| Download and use of images from this site is a violation of copyright law and legal action will be pursued, unless permission has been granted by the author. All images are copyright Athena Rayne Anderson unless otherwise stated. |
Athena Rayne Anderson 
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