Researchers at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum have created quite a buzz, uncovering an insect long forgotten by people in Saskatchewan.  

The Macropis Cuckoo Bee specimen was discovered near Grasslands National Park, close to Wood Mountain. The rare invertebrate is a nest parasite, which is how it got its name: cuckoo.  

Corey Sheffield, the curator of invertebrate zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina is a part of the team that has discovered the bee. 

Sheffield has quite a long history with this bee. In the early 2000s, he found two specimens of it in Nova Scotia. He published the paper on it, disproving the popular belief that the bee was extinct in North America, as it hadn't been collected since the 1960s. 

“It's always been a rare bee, but they just thought it was gone,” explained Sheffield. “Then I rediscovered it, and since then, there's been a few additional records found... but in Saskatchewan, the species was known from two historic sites. One of those was down near Wood Mountain in sort of the southern part of the province, and the other one was from an area called Wallwort, which is in the north by Green Water Lake Provincial Park. “ 

Like a cuckoo bird, it goes into the nest of another specific type of bee and lays its eggs in that nest. The rarity of this creature can be attributed to its highly specific conditions for the habitat in which it can thrive. 

Back in 2013, Sheffield and his team had done some survey work in various parts of the province, collecting so many samples that the museum is still processing them even now.  

“As we were processing those samples this summer, we had two summer students who were helping us, and I was walking by one of their desks looking at the specimens that they were painting,” he recalled. “And I said, 'Well, that bee looks different.' Quickly we looked at our microscope and realized that's the one we've been looking for a very long time. That was the first time that species had been seen in Saskatchewan for almost 50 years.” 

An assessment is currently underway by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), and the invertebrates may land on the Species at Risk List, which could prompt conservation strategies on a province-by-province basis. 

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