‘Metallic blue’ creature that does handstands discovered in Texas. It’s a new species

A fuzzy blue creature discovered in Texas flies, digs and does handstands, and it’s been identified as a new species, researchers said in a recent study.

The creature, which researchers have described as both “metallic” and “sparkly,” puts an unusual twist on a familiar animal, according to the Nov. 3 study published in the journal of Ecology and Evolution.

It’s a bee, dubbed Andrena androfovea, and the colorful insect has been flying under the radar in Texas and Oklahoma for years, researchers said in a University of Oklahoma news release. One of the paper’s authors, John Neff, actually captured some of the bees in 1987 after spotting them while driving near the U.S.-Mexico border, Neff told Texas Monthly, though he didn’t immediately realize what he had.

Through analysis of DNA and video footage capturing the bee’s unique behavior, researchers proved what they suspected: the blue bug was a new species.

Andrena androfovea is the latest to join the Andrena genus, the miner bees, of which there are about 1,700 members. But even among its closest relatives, it stands apart.

“I observed this matte-blue-colored bee doing a handstand on the flower, sucking nectar with its tongue while scraping the flower with its hind legs and rubbing the flower with its hairy belly,” James Hung, co-author and assistant professor of biology at OU, said in the release. “This is pretty unusual behavior for a member of the mining bee genus and really helps us showcase the unique evolutionary innovations of this new subgenus.”

The bee “is not closely related to any Andrena bees discovered thus far and makes this a significant discovery,” according to researchers.

“This new species, however, is so distantly related to any other Andrena that we think it has formed its own branch on the Andrena family tree about 12.6 million years ago,” lead author Silas Bossert, assistant professor at Washington State University, said in the release.

The bee is also drawn to two particular flowers more than any other, purple groundcherry and greenleaf five eyes, which are in the nightshade family, though neither is poisonous.

It appears to be the first known member of its genus to specialize in plants belonging to that family, Hung said in a post on X.

“What’s really unusual about (this bee) is that it seems to only collect pollen from the plant genera Chamaesaracha and Quincula, which are both part of Solanaceae (Nightshade-family),” Bossert told McClatchy News in an email. “Once we realized this, we had a good lead that this is likely an undescribed species of bees. We also only find this bee in areas where these plants occur.”

The male bees are usually 7.1 mm in length, or about one-third of an inch, according to the study. Females are a little bit bigger, measuring roughly 8.1 mm on average.

The bees vary in coloration between the states. While the specimens found in Texas are almost uniformly blue, the Oklahoma population has a “greenish hint” to their exoskeleton.

“The US is home to over 3,500 different species of native bees, yet we believe that many species still await to be discovered and described to science. If we want to protect and work towards bee conservation, we need to know ‘who’ they are,” Bossert said. “The next undescribed species may be in your back yard, but we need to invest in training the next generation of bee scientists to be able to recognize undescribed biodiversity—education is key.”

The full research team included Bossert, Hung and Neff.

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