Filed under the wrong names for decades: two Kyrgyzstan bees finally get their own

Some bees never build a nest or carry a speck of pollen. Cuckoo bees slip their eggs into other bees' nests and let the hosts do the raising — and because they skip all that work, they all look almost exactly alike, which has made them a nightmare to tell apart. In the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, two of them sat in collections for decades filed under other bees' names. Now a team led by researcher Thomas Wood has sorted out the whole group across Europe and Central Asia, matching a short genetic fingerprint — a DNA barcode — against museum specimens and fresh catches. The clean-up gave the two Kyrgyzstan bees names of their own, Thyreus impressus and Thyreus jansseni, paired up males and females that had never been linked, and produced a new identification key, so the next person who meets one of these bees can actually know its name.

SDG 15 · Life on land