The researchers identified 15 new bees and bees

Cuckoo bees often enter the nest of other bees to lay eggs. After that, their newly hatched bees will kill and eat bees or eggs of bees that host the nest to consume food that pollens the bees return.

Recently, in an article published in the open access journal ZooKeys, 15 new bees were identified, of which nine were discovered displayed in collections and museums across North America. by TS. York Thomas Onuferko at the Faculty of Science, York University (UK), along with six other species has not been published.

Cuckoo bees have similar shapes. However, unlike other bees, cuckoo bees do not have hairs - tools to collect pollen. In fact, the information about this species is not much, except that their names are placed according to the cuckoo bird that exhibits similar behavior as the owner of absenteeism to lay eggs in the nest of the species. other birds.

Cuckoo bees do not have hairs - tools to collect pollen.

Currently, there are a total of 43 known cuckoo bees in the genus Epeolus (pronounced ee-pee-oh-lus) in North America. Some of them are unnoticed because they have a habit of hovering near the ground or "sleeping" on leaves because there is no nest of their own. They have a body length of only 5.5 to 10mm, smaller and rarer than bees that own the nest they invade.

Dr. Onuferko said: 'This seems surprising for some areas that have been thoroughly researched and explored like Canada and the United States still have the potential to detect new species'. "People may have been informed about some of the new species that I described, but in fact they have never been named before. There are even some other species that have never been known."

One of the reasons that makes it difficult to identify the bees is because they are small in shape, not collected regularly and difficult to distinguish. Onuferko visited places displaying collections of cuckoo bees across North America and collected samples and sent them to the Packer Laboratory at York University to conduct tests.

Many new bees and bees have been described in the form of short black, white, red and yellow hairs, forming beautiful looking patterns. Among them, there is one species named Onuferko named after the missionary, the famous English naturalist Sir David Attenborough: Epeolus attenboroughi . Besides, Onuferko also named another species of bees, Epeolus packeri , according to Professor Laurence Packer, bee researcher, York University. He argued that the name "epeolus" came from the short name Epeus / Epeius of a soldier in Greek mythology.

The discovery of 15 new bees and bees gives hope and joy to researchers and enthusiasts to learn about bees.