âExtinctâ native bee back after 100 years
Pets & Animals
by David Mills
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A species of native bee not seen in nearly 100 years has been rediscovered after extensive searches along Australia's east coast.
The last recorded sighting of Pharohylaeus lactiferus was in 1923, but Flinders University PhD candidate James Dorey collected six individual bees in three sites in Queensland - Atherton, Kuranda and Eungella - after sampling 225 individual locations.
One of 202 species of masked bee in Australia, the black-bodied insects with distinctive white face markings are slightly smaller than the common European honeybee, and may have a thing for the colour red: they were discovered solely on Illawarra flame trees and firewheels.