Lost and found: how two dead giant bees on eBay sparked the hunt to find one alive

An expedition to find Wallace's giant bee in the wild led to its rediscovery' in Indonesia's Maluku islands

A flying bulldog" is how conservation photographer Clay Bolt described it, while local people call it raja ofu, or the king of bees. Wallace's giant bee (Megachile pluto) is certainly a bee-hemoth. The world's largest species of bee, it can grow to four times the size of a honeybee, with a wingspan of 64mm (2.5in). Such a giant should be hard to lose, but the incredibly rare bee, native to a cluster of Indonesian islands, was feared extinct for nearly 40 years, until Bolt and his colleagues rediscovered" it in 2019.

The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, collected the first known sample of the bee in 1858 while exploring Bacan, one of northern Indonesia's Maluku (Moluccas) islands. Wallace collected a single female of the species, and noted it as a large, black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle".