![]() Wallace's giant bee is also threatened by deforestation and habitat loss. Vereecken is pushing to change its status, though doing so will require more study. Vereecken and others think it should be classified as endangered, at the very least, considering how rare it is and that its range is almost certainly smaller than originally thought. Wallace’s giant bee is currently only considered “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation statuses of animals around the world. It’s currently legal for this species to be sold across borders, as the animal is not protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which governs international trade in threatened species. This male Andrena perplexa was caught in Maryland on May 16. He described these sales in a study published in December in the Journal of Insect Conservation. Vereecken is alarmed that this insect has been sold online-and it’s possible that more commerce is taking place through less visible channels. The bee, it seemed, was very much still around. Later in 2018, the same collector sold another for a couple thousand dollars. The very same day, Vereecken discovered that a collector was selling a specimen of Megachile pluto online, on eBay-it eventually sold for $9,100. (The man was thought to be dead by many in France, but Vereecken found to his surprise and joy that de Chenon is alive, and living in Melbourne, Australia.) Early last year, at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, he stumbled across a specimen collected in 1991 by a French researcher named Roch Desmier de Chenon. Over a decade ago, he sought out a specimen collected by Wallace himself, housed at Oxford Natural History Museum. He studies bee diversity and was naturally interested to see the world’s largest. Many have become intrigued by the insect, including Nicolas Vereecken, an entomologist and ecologist at the University of Brussels.
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