The striking new bee was found during surveys of a rare wildflower that grows only in the Bremer Range region in Western Australia.<\/p>\n
Lead author of the study Dr Kit Prendergast from Curtin University in Perth explained: “I discovered the species while surveying a rare plant in the Goldfields and noticed this bee visiting both the endangered wildflower and a nearby mallee tree.<\/p>\n
“The female had these incredible little horns on her face,” Dr Prendergast noticed.<\/p>\n
Experts think the horns may be used as a defence mechanism, to gather pollen or nectar, or to help collect materials such as resin for nests.<\/p>\n
DNA analysis confirmed that the new horned insect didn’t match any previously known bees species.<\/p>\n
Researchers said that the discovery came as a real surprise to the team.<\/p>\n
Dr Prendergast added: “It’s the first new member of this bee group to be described in more than 20 years, which really shows how much life we still have to discover.”<\/p>\n
The bee has been named ‘Megachile Lucifer’, inspired by its tiny devil-like horns. Lucifer – which means “light bringer” in Latin – is also a reference to shining light on the need for better conservation of native bee species and greater understanding of how endangered plants are pollinated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The striking new bee was found during surveys of a rare wildflower that grows only in the Bremer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-256807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}