As soon as the blue calamintha bee arrived on the scene, scientists worried it might be gone for good.
The indigo insect was last spotted in central Florida in 2016, five years after it was first identified. But this spring, just as Americans began to hunker down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rare blue bees, known scientifically as Osmia calaminthae, were rediscovered in the same region foraging on Ashe's calamint, a dainty violet flower that blooms in certain scrub habitats.
Chase Kimmel of the Florida Museum of Natural History confirmed the bees’ survival in March. At first, he couldn’t believe his own eyes. “It was a great feeling; those first few nights were hard to sleep due to the anxiousness and excitement,” he says. “The first few times I found the bee I couldn’t help [but] constantly question my own eyes and judgment on the diagnostic characteristics of the bee. I needed to look multiple times at the photos to confirm their identity.”
In all, Kimmel and colleagues documented just 17 rare bees and never more than three at any one time. To find these few, and record them for potential legal protections, Kimmel ventured to different sites across the Lake Wales Sand Ridge, a 150-mile long region along the dirt roads of central Florida marked by sprawling citrus groves and Bok’s Singing Tower, a 205-foot iridescent neo-Gothic structure. It’s a place where the jasmine-like scent of orange blossoms hangs thick in the air.
“The Lake Wales Ridge is a pretty specialized environment composed of unique scrub habitat that is limited in geographic extent,” Kimmel says. The flower that hosts the bee is restricted to a few of these isolated scrub pockets, predominantly along the ridge, Kimmel says, meaning the bee has probably always been restricted to a small area.
