THE BEE CAUSE

People love bees. Most folks are particularly enamoured with those colony bees who gift us honey but who make up just 5% of bee species and tend to neglect the far more numerous solitary variety comprising the overwhelming majority of bee diversity. But how many bee species are there?

Of course it is very difficult to estimate the number of unknown organisms. What we do know is that to date we've identified something like 2.1 million total species. And somewhere on the order of 16,000-17,000 organisms new to science are discovered each year. The majority of those, around 10,000, are arthropods (crabs, lobsters, scorpions, spiders and friends) and insects and around a hundred are bees. Okay, but how many bee species are there on Earth?

Well, back in 2007, in his tome The Bees of the World, Michener noted there were about 17,000 bee species described at that time. A little over a decade later, by 2020, the world checklist for bee species found at Discover Life accounted for roughly 21,000 species. But just now arrived the first serious estimate for how many bee species there might be on our planet. This landmark study published in Nature Communications, coming from Australian evolutionary biologist James Dorey and based on 45 years of taxonomic research, estimates as many as 26,164 bee species; meaning there are thousands of species who remain unclassified and entirely unnoticed.

Get out there, kids!