At any given time, the soil under Texans’ feet is active with an abundance of ground-dwelling critters, from venomous snakes and plump prairie dogs to redheaded centipedes, surly badgers, snapping turtles, and horror-movie worms that secrete neurotoxins and split into two when chopped. Investigate that weird hole in your backyard at your own peril. Scientists are learning more about the critters below us all the time, and they’ve just uncovered a new one: Andrena androfovea, a reclusive, solitary ground-nesting bee with a blue-tinged body and no fangs or claws or even a stinger, thank heavens. So far, this harmless hoverer has been found only in Texas and Oklahoma, according to a recent study in the journal Ecology and Evolution, which describes a new species and subgenus.
The bee was first spotted in 1987 by Jack Neff, an entomologist who directs the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin and is known as the Texas Bee Guru. Neff saw Andrena androfovea that year as he was cruising the roadsides near the U.S.-Mexico border, between Del Rio and Laredo, looking for bees to capture and study. He watched the shimmering blue insect collecting pollen from the flowers of the Quincula lobata, or purple ground-cherry plant, scraping the pollen onto its abdomen and legs before flying away. It was a strange sight, as ground-cherries are in the plant family Solanaceae—including potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and nightshade—which Andrena bees typically shun. But this one seemed to love the stuff, as well as another Solanaceae, the curiously named hairy five eyes or false nightshade. Neff caught the odd insect with a handheld net and brought it back to his home in Austin’s Northwest Hills neighborhood.
In the years that followed, Neff found several more of the mysterious metallic-blue bees along stretches of borderland roadway. But the insect’s identity evaded him until he put a specimen under the microscope. Between the bee’s eyes, Neff noted a telltale hairy facial depression called a fovea that is common to bees of genus Andrena, a large and varied group of insects called mining bees because they excavate nests in the ground. Still, that didn’t narrow the field much: There are four hundred members of Andrena in North America alone, and some 1,700 worldwide. Neff was sure he’d found a new species, but the insect’s foraging behavior made it difficult to classify. “This one really didn’t place well anywhere,” he says. “It’s the only Andrena in North America to regularly visit a member of the [Solanaceae] family.”
Neff, who estimates that he has collected approximately 40,000 bees in his lifetime, was confounded by this one until late 2022, when he traveled to College Station for an annual entomologist confab at Texas A&M University. In attendance was James Hung, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, who’d brought a curious bee from the Sooner State with him. Lo and behold, it was the same bee Neff had puzzled over for decades. “The first thing I said was, ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s my bee,’ ” he says. “It was in the middle of Oklahoma; I hadn’t realized it got that far north.” Previously, Neff had only received reports of bee sightings as far up as Abilene. He asked Hung to document the Oklahoma bees’ foraging behavior with detailed photographs, and bingo: The insects’ singular interest in the flowers of the purple ground-cherry plant meshed with Neff’s observations from the eighties. The scientists then teamed up with another researcher, Silas Bossert at Washington State University, who used genetic sequencing to determine that Andrena androfovea was indeed a new branch on the family tree. It split from the rest of its genera 12.6 million years ago—a relatively recent development in bee time. Its range likely includes northeastern Mexico and a swath of Texas that stretches from our border with Mexico to our border with Oklahoma. Though it hasn’t been documented there, the bee may be found in Kansas, where the ground-cherry plant also grows.
Since members of this new species have been seen only while they’re foraging, researchers can only speculate on their nesting habits. Other members of the Andrena genus dig a hole in the soil eighteen to thirty inches deep, chiseling out four to eight cells and laying a single egg in each one. The cells are packed with provisions of pollen for the larvae to eat when they hatch. Some of the bees take longer to leave their nurseries than others. “They essentially behave like seeds,” Neff says. “Solitary bees can skip years if it’s dry. If it’s dry, you just won’t see them.” But during wet springs, in May or June, Andrena bees buzz from their burrows, pushing past bugs that bite and poisonous worms until they emerge topside to seek out their strange fruit. So if you spot a flash of blue buzzing around some purple flowers in your yard, look closely—it might just be Neff’s elusive bee.
