New, blue bee discovered by researchers in Texas

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that 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.”