New bee identified in park

A recently documented kind of bee has been identified living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Will Kuhn, director of science and research at Discover Life in America, said the bee, Epeolus inornatus, was found during two observations off Baskins Creek Trail.

“We collected this back in 2019. We had a study going, sampling for insects at a couple of different places in the park after the 2016 Chimney Tops 2 Fire,” he said.

Researchers were looking to see “if the fire was having long-term effects on the biodiversity, looking for turnover in the plant life, which would result in turnover in insects,” he said.

“The Baskins Creek area was pretty much burned to the ground” in the fire, he said.

Discover Life in America is a nonprofit whose main project, the All Taxa Biodiversity Index, is dedicated to cataloguing every single species within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s 816-square-mile boundary.

The newly discovered bee, given the common name ‘cellophane-cuckoo bee,’ was observed in the park on June 28, 2019. Kuhn posted images of the bee to Inaturalist, a website that shares data with experts around the globe.

“The world expert on this genus, who had actually recently named this particular bee species, identified it for us,” Kuhn said. “We noticed we didn’t have it on our list of park species. It’s probably been here before, we probably just hadn’t detected it,” he said.

They new bee is called the cellophane-cuckoo bee because it is a cleptoparasite of the cellophane bee.

“Cellophane bees are solitary bees, not social, like honey or bumble bees. Lady cellophane bees dig little nests in the ground for their larvae. They paint the walls of each little cell with this glue-like stuff that dries like cellophane to protect their eggs from mold and moisture. They make a little cell, fill it with pollen for their larvae to eat, then lay an egg and seal the cell up with cellophane. Now, cellophane-cuckoo bees cheat the system, like a cuckoo bird. They sneak into the nests, cut a little hole in a cell's cellophane wrapper, lay their own egg, reseal and leave, all without collecting any food for their larvae. The cellophane-cuckoo bee egg hatches first and eats its host's egg and all the delicious pollen the cellophane bee left for its larvae,” he said.

The bee was identified by Thomas M. Onuferko, of the Department of Biology at York University in Toronto.

Kuhn said the cellophane-cuckoo bee is known to pollinate "just two plants, one of them is a relative of the blueberry, farkleberry, and the other one is called turkey oak, a subgroup of red oak."

Kuhn said that 1,028 species have been discovered here in the park that had never been seen on the earth, though the newly described bee is found across the Southeast U.S., from Texas to New England.

He said his group “already has several other species that we need to confirm, that seem to be other new species records for the park. We have a backlog of, particularly, insect material, waiting for their secrets to be revealed.”