Rare ‘cuckoo’ creature — not seen locally in 65 years — found in Canada, officials say

While cataloging a collection of insect specimens, a museum curator in Canada came across something rather buzzworthy.

An extremely rare bee — once thought extinct and not seen locally in decades — was sitting in front of him.

“It was pretty exciting,” Cory Sheffield, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, said in a Sept. 27 news release.

The small insect, known as the Macropis cuckoo bee, is “one of the most uncommon bees in Canada,” Sheffield said.

The museum specimen was collected near Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park by Wood Mountain, situated on the Montana border, in 2013, officials said. It then went overlooked in storage for years.

“For insects collected by museum researchers, it sometimes takes a long time to process and identify all that you’ve captured,” Sheffield said.

Prior to the discovery of the museum specimen, the cuckoo bee hadn’t been recorded in Saskatchewan, a province roughly the size of Texas, for over 65 years.

In fact, the bee went undetected for so long that it was believed to be extinct throughout Canada until several specimens were found in Nova Scotia in the 2000s. Now, it’s considered to be endangered in the country.

In the U.S., too, the cuckoo bee is extremely uncommon. Only one female was documented in Connecticut in 2006, according to a 2011 report from the Canadian government, leading the bee to be called “one of the rarest bees in North America.”

The black, wasp-like bugs are parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other bee species, where their larvae consume food intended for other bees.

The cuckoos are also totally reliant on the oil produced by one flower, the fringed loosestrife, which is native to Canada and the United States.

The discovery of the museum specimen is significant because it indicates that populations of the cuckoo bee might still exist in Saskatchewan, Sheffield said.

This story was originally published October 3, 2023 at 6:56 AM with the headline "Rare ‘cuckoo’ creature — not seen locally in 65 years — found in Canada, officials say."