New, blue bee discovered by researchers in Texas and Oklahoma

By Miriam Fauzia | Dallas Morning News (TNS)

A new species of metallic blue bee, found so far in Texas and Oklahoma, was recently discovered by researchers.

The bee, called Andrena androfovea, is part of a family of bees known as mining bees for their solitary lifestyle — unlike the social honey bee — and underground nests. However, in the new study detailing the bee’s discovery, the researchers note that Andrena androfovea appears to be a new branch of the mining bee family, with a peculiar penchant for nightshade plants.

“The process of documenting bee biodiversity started centuries ago, but scientists are still discovering new species all the time,” James Hung, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma who co-authored the paper, said in a press release.

Andrena androfovea was first found in the late 1980s by entomologist Jack Neff of the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin. Neff, another co-author of the study, caught the bee near the Texas-Mexico border while it was pollinating flowers of the purple groundcherry, part of the nightshade family.

Mining bees tend to avoid nightshades, so seeing one cozying up to them was a curious sight. It wasn’t until over three decades later when Neff met Hung and Silas Bossert, an evolutionary biologist at Washington State University, that the trio discovered the nightshade-loving bee was a new species in the Andrena family.

“This new species, however, is so distantly related to any other Andrena that we think it has formed its own branch on the Andrena family tree about 12.6 million years ago,” Bossert, the study’s lead author, said in the press release. “We know this because we sequenced and compared its genome to those of other bees. Using a technique called ‘molecular clock’, we can approximate how much time has passed since this lineage has separated from the other bees based on differences in its genome.”

Hung explained the identity of Andrena androfovea went unknown because new bee species are often compared to museum specimens and don’t necessarily undergo genetic analysis.

In addition to doing the genetic analysis, the researchers observed the bee’s foraging and pollinating behavior, which was different from other mining bees.

“I observed this matte-blue-colored bee doing a handstand on the flower, sucking nectar with its tongue while scraping the flower with its hind legs and rubbing the flower with its hairy belly,” Hung said in the release. “This is pretty unusual behavior for a member of the mining bee genus and really helps us showcase the unique evolutionary innovations of this new subgenus.”

In an email to The Dallas Morning News, Bossert said while the researchers collected bees from sites in southwestern Oklahoma and southern, western and central Texas, it remains to be seen whether Andrena androfovea lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“I would assume that it could very well be around there, we have just not looked there yet,” Bossert wrote. Because the bees seem to collect pollen from wild ground cherries and Chamaesaracha, a perennial herb commonly known as five eyes, he added, “these plants very likely need to be present in order for the bee to be able to survive.”

Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.

©2024 The Dallas Morning News. Visit dallasnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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