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Updated at 6:40 a.m. Friday

You might think the world’s biggest bee would be easy to find. But that’s not the case: Until recently, the last time anyone had reported seeing a Wallace’s giant bee living in the wild was in 1981. That changed in January, when the rare bee was spotted on an island of Indonesia.

The Wallace’s giant bee Megachile pluto towers over European honeybees. The female’s size has been recorded as at least an inch and a half long, with a tongue that’s nearly an inch long. Add to that a pair of gigantic mandibles, and it’s a bee like no other.

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Very few people are going to want to leave this planet permanently — it’s just too amazing.


“Ultimately what will happen, is this planet will be zoned residential and light industry,” he said. “This is the gem of the Solar System. Why would we do heavy industry here? It’s nonsense.”

Bezos also referenced the work of physicist Gerard O’Neill, who came up with the idea of a cylinder-shaped space settlement design known as an “O’Neill cylinder,” in which two counter-rotating cylinders would provide gravity for human settlers while mitigating gyroscopic effects.

Similar space colonies have been depicted in popular sci-fi movies including “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).

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You’d think that the world’s biggest bee would be hard to lose track of. But Wallace’s Giant Bee — an Indonesian species with a 2.5-inch (6.4 centimeters) wingspan and enormous mandibles — was last seen by researchers in 1981; it was feared to be extinct. However, scientists finally spotted the rare bee in January, in the Indonesian province of North Maluku on the Maluku Islands. They detected a solitary female bee after investigating the region for five days, and a photographer captured the first-ever images of a living Wallace’s Giant Bee (Megachile pluto) at the insect’s nest in an active termite mound.


Wallace’s Giant Bee — the largest bee on Earth — hasn’t been seen for decades. However, scientists recently tracked it down on an island in Indonesia.

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