A little dot on a foreleg here, a change in hair banding on the abdomen there.
But Dr Leijs’ team has now described an incredible 71 new resin pot bee species, up from the handful previously known to science.
The team, which includes Queensland Museum’s Dr Judith King, Dr Katja Hogendoorn from the University of Adelaide, and Dr James Dorey from the University of Wollongong, published their paper in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy.
“It doesn’t happen often – 71 is quite a lot,” he said of the new species.
“When I started here there were only 12 named from the group.
“In one case, one species had a different name for the male and for the female, so we needed to retain one of the names.”
Resin pot bees are solitary and as the name suggests, they build tiny pots from harvested tree resin, in which they lay their eggs. The pots can hang individually or in groups from tree branches or twigs.
The paper came from a three-year research project supported by taxonomy grants from Bush Blitz, and included bees already stored in various museum collections for decades, and from fieldwork around the country including Bush Blitz surveys.
Bush Blitzes are funded through a partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earth Watch Australia, to discover new species and to document fauna and flora from selected national reserves.
Dr Leijs, who is an honorary researcher with the South Australian Museum, appreciates the difference between species can be tiny, but said the more he looks, the better he understands.
For example, the seemingly innocuous dots on the male bee’s foreleg distinguish him to females of the same species when it comes to mating.
Some of the species can overlap in habitat considerably, and Dr Leijs said one of the mysteries about the bees is why they became and remain distinct.
“You can go to a flowering eucalyptus tree and find 50 native bee species, and some are very closely related,” he said. “Why that happens … it’s a bit unclear.”
Many resin pot species are known from only a single location, and sometimes by a single bee specimen.
In all, with the new publication, about 1800 separate native Australian bee species including resin pots are now known.
Dr Leijs says there are still plenty of undescribed species.
“We think there are more than 2500 species in Australia,” he said. “Every time I go into the outback I find new ones. Most of those are chance meetings though – next time you go, they may not be there”.
“The important thing with a paper like this is that the bees now have a name, because without a name it is hard to protect them. Unfortunately, for most of the species we don’t know much about their biology and therefore how to protect them; some could be gone already.”
Then again, there are good-news stories.
“I’ve done work on another group of bees that had a species that was discovered in 1905 and then was only found again after 100 years,” he said”.
“The role of museum collections are important because they preserve the specimens for future reference.
“These specimens are available for re-examination by researchers in Australia and abroad when more undescribed species are found, or to study the evolutionary relationships with other taxa.
“Also important, is that specimen records may help in the conservation of species.”
“Two hundred specimens collected in South Australia associated with this work were lodged in The South Australian Museum collection.”
The full paper published by the Australian Journal of Taxonomy can be found here.
