A brand new species of metal blue bee, discovered to this point in Texas and Oklahoma, used to be not too long ago found out by way of researchers.The bee, referred to as Andrena androfovea, is a part of a circle of relatives of bees referred to as mining bees for his or her solitary way of life — not like the social honey bee — and underground nests. Alternatively, within the new find out about detailing the bee’s discovery, the researchers be aware that Andrena androfovea seems to be a brand new department of the mining bee circle of relatives, with a abnormal penchant for nightshade vegetation.“The method of documenting bee biodiversity began centuries in the past, however scientists are nonetheless finding new species at all times,” James Hung, an assistant professor of biology on the College of Oklahoma who co-authored the paper, mentioned in a press free up.Andrena androfovea used to be first discovered within the overdue Nineteen Eighties by way of entomologist Jack Neff of the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin. Neff, some other co-author of the find out about, stuck the bee close to the Texas-Mexico border whilst it used to be pollinating plant life of the pink groundcherry, a part of the nightshade circle of relatives.Breaking NewsGet the newest breaking information from North Texas and past.Mining bees generally tend to steer clear of nightshades, so seeing one cozying as much as them used to be a curious sight. It wasn’t till over 3 many years later when Neff met Hung and Silas Bossert, an evolutionary biologist at Washington State College, that the trio found out the nightshade-loving bee used to be a brand new species within the Andrena circle of relatives.“This new species, on the other hand, is so distantly associated with every other Andrena that we predict it has shaped its personal department at the Andrena circle of relatives tree about 12.6 million years in the past,” Bossert, the find out about’s lead writer, mentioned within the press free up. “We all know this as a result of we sequenced and in comparison its genome to these of different bees. The use of one way referred to as ‘molecular clock’, we will be able to approximate how a lot time has handed since this lineage has separated from the opposite bees in line with variations in its genome.”
