The Bees We Haven’t Met Yet: A global look at the bee species still waiting to be discovered (Ep. 80)
How many bee species share this planet with us? For decades, the answer hovered around 20,000 — a number repeated in textbooks, conservation plans, and scientific papers. But new research led by Dr. James Dorey suggests that figure has been dramatically underestimated. His team’s global analysis points to at least 25,000–26,000 species, and likely many more.
In our episode, James walks us through the surprising hotspots, the data gaps, and why naming species is not only scientifically important, it’s economically smart. A recent Australian analysis found that every $1 invested in discovering and describing species returns up to $35 in economic benefits. That includes:
- better land‑use planning
- more targeted conservation
- improved agricultural resilience
- stronger ecosystem services
James’ work reminds us that biodiversity isn’t a static list — it’s a living, expanding story. Every unnamed species represents a missing piece of the ecological puzzle. And every new discovery helps us better understand how to protect the systems that feed us, sustain us, and bring us joy.
Dr. James Dorey is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. This is the study we discussed. He’s also a professional photographer – check out his gorgeous bee photos!
Good to know
James’ team assembled one of the most comprehensive bee datasets ever created: 8.3 million occurrence records, national species checklists, and a global taxonomy of all described species. But one of the most striking findings is what wasn’t in the data. More than 4,000 described species had no occurrence records at all. These “known unknowns” had to be reconstructed by going back to original species descriptions and estimating how many specimens were collected.
Transcript
[00:00:00.420] – Jacy Meyer
Welcome to The Bee’s Knees, a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer, and I thank you for being here. What if one of the most important numbers in nature, the number of bee species on Earth has been wrong this whole time. Today we’re digging into the data with Dr. James Dorey. He and his team believe there are thousands of bee species we didn’t even know existed, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of global biodiversity. James takes us behind the scenes of the research, the bottleneck in documenting the world’s bees, and why counting species isn’t just an academic exercise. It’s a key to protecting ecosystems, agriculture, and our food future.
[00:01:06.510] – Jacy Meyer
So your study suggests there are thousands more bee species than science has formally described. What surprised you most about the global patterns of hidden diversity, and which regions appear to hold the greatest number of yet-to-be-identified species?
[00:01:22.710] – Dr. James Dorey
Sure, I mean, there were some surprises. I think some of the biggest surprises actually were we predicted there’ll be fewer species. For example, Oceania, I would have expected to have a really high expected number of species, but I think that there are some biases in the data there. And again, those surprising things, even if it’s not what you expect, and maybe the data is actually the problem. They can actually still teach you quite a lot, I think, about the patterns and the patterns of how we work as well. But the places that had the highest anticipated diversity, two of them didn’t surprise me. At the country level, it was Brazil and China, and I would have expected both of those to have quite a lot of undescribed diversity. But I didn’t exactly expect Turkey to come out so bright. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s just, it’s, I guess it’s a nexus of different European and Asian, uh, continents and the, the different habitats and stuff in Turkey. And it’s a reasonably sized country, so that didn’t surprise me. The other two were Turkey a little bit, but then some of the other things like Africa showing up with just a patchwork of lower expected diversity.
[00:02:43.330] – Dr. James Dorey
And again, it’s just, I think it’s a lot to do with the data and how little data we have. Some countries didn’t have any occurrence records at all. So yeah, it was very interesting. It’s fun to kind of pull apart what you think might be biological and what we think might be really data-driven issues.
[00:03:09.730] – Jacy Meyer
So let’s talk about how you arrived at your number. You combined global datasets, country checklists, taxonomy, and statistical estimators to build this new global count. At a high level, what made this approach more powerful or accurate than previous attempts to estimate bee diversity?
[00:03:32.550] – Dr. James Dorey
Sure, so there have been several other previous attempts, of course. At the global level, there was one published by Charles Michener who in 2007 suggested that there were 18,000 described bee species and there would be more than 20,000 species in the world, which is technically correct because, you know, there’s no upper limit, but it’s not necessarily that, that helpful. And as it currently stands, we have 21,000 described species. You can find on the internet as well numbers suggesting that there are 40,000 species in the world. I could never find where those numbers came from. I kind of wonder if someone said, oh yeah, there might be 40,000 bees in a hive, and maybe someone thought species. In Australia, we actually had 4 estimates at least floating around. And they were basically all just someone sticking their thumb out and being like, I think, you know, maybe this many. So there actually weren’t really any or many statistical estimates of species richness. So in that sense, it was a pretty low bar to cross. It’s easy enough to do when no one else has really done it. And I guess taking a standardized approach. As you said, we use occurrence data from a big bee occurrence dataset which is collated from things like GBIF and Atlas of Living Australia and a few other repositories and previously private datasets.
[00:05:12.180] – Dr. James Dorey
And that covered most species. I think we ended up with about 4,000 or 5,000 species that didn’t have any occurrence records at all. Around the world, which sounds like a lot, and I guess it is. That’s coming up on a quarter of all species don’t have a single record, where obviously they should because someone described them from something. But what we did then was we kind of randomized and picked out 600 names from those species that we tried to find the sample size from the actual description. And from that we could kind of make a curve that we could apply to the rest of those species. So we can try and fill in some of those gaps to account for the known unknowns, if that makes sense. So we used a couple. One of them was rarefaction, which I think people can probably visualize a little bit better. You just kind of draw a line of how much— if you collected 1, 10, 100, 1,000 specimens, how many species do you expect to get for that, and if the curve starts to flatten out, you assume you’re getting pretty close to the total number. So it’s kind of an estimator of sample completeness.
[00:06:25.950] – Dr. James Dorey
We use another one as well called I-Chow, which is named after the person who, I guess, published it and came up with it. And again, it’s an estimator of sample completeness, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be used for species richness. You can use it for trying to estimate if you’ve sampled enough genetic variation in the population, if you expect to still find more haplotypes or different types of genetic structure. But the way I think about it is, if you imagine going out into two forests and say I gave you a net and I said go out for half an hour in each one and collect as many bees as you can in that time. So the first forest, say you collected 10 species and say you got between 20 and 50 specimens of each. Basically, you’ve got the same 10 species and you catch them over and over again. If you go into the second forest and you have the same time, let’s say you also catch 10 species, right? But in this instance, you might catch a few in really high abundance, you know, 50 specimens, but maybe you catch 2 or 3 only once or only twice.
[00:07:33.550] – Dr. James Dorey
And so even just heuristically, if you think about that, I guess if you ask yourself the question, which forest have I sampled more completely? You’d probably say the first one because you keep getting the same things over and over and over again. Whereas in the second forest, you keep getting all of these rare species. So that’s essentially how the estimator works. It looks at how many times you collect things really common and how many times you collect things that are really rare. And if there are lots of things that are really rare, then it says, well, there are probably actually more species to collect. We did both of those methods, and in almost all cases they more or less agreed on the number. But I guess the important thing to note as well, it’s actually an estimate of the lower bound of species richness. So when we have like those confidence intervals, we’re actually estimating the bottom. So, you know, in the paper we suggested there are 25,000 to 26,000 species in the world, but we would actually expect to exceed that.
[00:08:34.610] – Jacy Meyer
I want to go back to what you were saying about what you were expecting based on country. And so your findings show that some countries, like Turkey as you mentioned, they have hundreds of species still waiting to be discovered, while others like Sweden and Switzerland are nearly fully documented. You slightly touched on this, but what do these contrasts tell us about scientific effort, biodiversity, or both?
[00:09:00.700] – Dr. James Dorey
Yeah, so it’s a really interesting question because it can tell us different things and it can be hard to, to tease apart. Um, obviously countries like Switzerland and Sweden are very wealthy, so in terms of scientific effort, you could assume that there’s probably more funding and probably more work that have been done. They probably have a reasonably long history of entomological work as well. But they’re also more temperate, and we don’t necessarily expect to find higher bee diversity in temperate regions per se. So it’s probably a combination of the two, that there’s probably not as many species already and there’s been a lot of investment in science in those places. So I guess what it’s saying is actually in this instance we’re getting pretty close to the number of species that we’d expect to see. I was also thinking about this in, you know, all these northern European countries are all very happy and they’re all
[00:10:01.220] – Dr. James Dorey
having a longer life and stuff than some other places. And I like to think that maybe it’s because they understand their bees better. It just really comes across throughout the fabric of society. But I guess to contrast, those countries have had a really big investment in science. The United States has also had a very big investment in science, and there’s a lot of bee researchers coming out of the US, and they’ve been working in the US for a very long time, and they still have an estimate of a lot more species to be discovered. But it’s very, very diverse in the US, and it’s hard again to tease apart— is it really diverse because we put a lot of effort in and we can actually find all those cryptic species, uh, or is actually something biological and ecological about North America and stuff And that’s very possible because I think the southwestern arid parts of the US are a really big hotspot for bee diversity.
[00:11:02.490] – Jacy Meyer
So how might this expanded global bee count reshape conservation priorities or agricultural planning or just our understanding of ecosystem resilience, especially given that many species remain unnamed and unprotected?
[00:11:19.480] – Dr. James Dorey
Yes, well, that’s hitting the nail on the head, really. I mean, so many species remain undescribed, and it’s kind of possible to conserve things that aren’t described, but boy, it’s a lot harder. Uh, you know, even so, I kind of think about Fiji a lot of the time because I’ve done a lot of work in Fiji in my, my Old PhD supervisor did a lot of work there as well. And when we started working there, there were 4 described species that we know are native, and we now know that there are 29 at least in that group. And then we’ve also found another group that’s only found in the canopy more recently. And so there’s another, I think, 6 species there off the top of my head. So basically there’s, you know, increasing the size of the diversity in Fiji something like 8-fold. And if you wanted to conserve bee diversity in Fiji, you would basically be guessing, or you think, oh, maybe everything’s fine because a lot of those species are cryptic, or you don’t know they’re there. So you really can’t prioritize anything if you don’t know what’s there. You just assume that it’s all fine.
[00:12:36.360] – Dr. James Dorey
So So if we want to be able to prioritize where money goes and where we can serve and what we do, you really need to know the species. And I guess the very foundation of that is to know their names. It’s hard to go to a politician and say, let’s go and save vague species. You know, you might pick a few flagships and you have names and you said, we know there are this many. But I guess it’s also gives the power to say we don’t actually know them, but they’re estimated to be this many, so we need to probably invest in the taxonomy. And we also probably need to invest in conservation at the same time, assuming that we are hopefully going to be conserving those species that we haven’t named. And there are so many of them.
[00:13:23.190] – Jacy Meyer
For people listening who want to support biodiversity, especially these lesser-known wild species, what actions actually make a difference at the local or community level?
[00:13:34.170] – Dr. James Dorey
Sure. I mean, the easiest thing that anyone can do is plant native and local plants in their garden. I know the situation is very different in places like Australia than it is in Europe or North America. I think a lot of people plant a lot of wildflowers there, whereas in Australia I mean, you’ll get some native bees, but actually those native bees going to those flowers tend to be generalists. So picking things that are local is really helpful, and picking things that bees are likely to forage on. And then also having a diversity of floral resources there so that you’ll be attracting, uh, species across, you know, the families of bees. So that’s the most basic thing you can do, very much in your little sphere of influence, assuming you have a yard. I don’t actually have a yard here. And I guess if you wanted to work at the community level, you can, I guess, lobby local governments to, to do plantings or to not poison everything or whatever else. And then I guess the big things are really happening at state and federal levels.
[00:14:51.070] – Jacy Meyer
So in all your time working with bees and in biodiversity, has there been a discovery or some other part of your work that has given you hope or made you feel like you were making a difference?
[00:15:01.560] – Dr. James Dorey
So in terms of things that give me hope, I think in general doing science communication and talking to people, and especially in terms of the hope thing, like you get to see how excited people are about nature and about bees. I guess you’re probably already getting a bit of a biased audience there for people who want to come along to a talk or who want to talk to, to me about what I do. But I think it’s very nice. But for bees, people are very excited, and they actually, by and large, understand their importance. I don’t really need to sell that to them. But then it’s exciting to be able to say, hey, there’s actually more than just the European honeybee and bumblebee, you know, and both of those species are invasive in Australia where they aren’t in, you know, other places. So I think seeing how passionate people can be about nature and about insects is, is the most hopeful. In terms of making a difference, I just love finding out new things and sharing them. So I like— a lot of my projects are kind of born out of interest. So this project, for example, we’re talking about now, I was kind of sick of just being like, oh, you know, we’ve got these estimates, I guess I could pick one, but they’ve kind of all been pulled out of someone’s proverbial, and I want something a bit more solid and interesting.
[00:16:30.480] – Dr. James Dorey
And so that’s kind of how it came about. I just wanted to know the answer. Some other projects, there’s a small one I did on a bee genus called Pharaohalis. It’s monotypic in Australia, but there’s one species here, there’s another species in Papua New Guinea, but in Australia it hadn’t been found in 100 years. And I managed to find it again, and since then a whole bunch of citizen scientists have been finding it in other places as well. And now I’m doing a follow-up study to be like, okay, well, why couldn’t we find it before? And I really don’t know, because it’s— where it’s popping up now is where a lot of entomologists have been for a long time, and it’s I don’t know, but those kinds of things, I guess, makes it feel like I’m making a difference, I guess, in the sense I’m generating knowledge. And then you can actually make conservation leaps and improvements, I suppose, on the back of those things. Because previously we thought that species was probably extinct, like we had no idea. And that kind of knowledge is really foundational to things like threatened species listings. And it’s just really fun as well.
[00:17:42.380] – Jacy Meyer
As James reminds us, understanding how many species share this planet isn’t trivia. It’s the foundation for conservation, resilience, and smart decision-making. His team’s work doesn’t just expand the global bee list. It offers a treasure map for where new species are waiting to be found, and highlights how much life on Earth we still don’t fully grasp. And I have to say, I’m fully convinced by his theory that the countries topping those happiest nations lists are often the same ones that know and care for their bees. Thank you, James, for breaking down your study, and thank you for listening. I’m so grateful for this community that cares about the tiny creatures holding our world together. Until next time, remember, All bees count, and so do you.