New 'Lucifer' bee with devil-like horns found
A scientist has discovered a new species of bee in Australia. The bee has tiny horns on its head. The scientist is bee ecologist Dr Kit Prendergast. She gave the bee the Latin name Megachile lucifer. "Lucifer" is another name for the Devil. Dr Prendergast found the bee while she was doing a survey of an endangered wildflower in the city of Perth, Western Australia. She told the "Perth Now" news agency that she gave the bee its name because of its horns. She said: "These horns are very distinct and devilish. I wanted to call it a devil-like name and so I decided on Lucifer." She added: "Lucifer means 'light bringer' in Latin. I want to bring light to issues around the lack of conservation of native bees."
Australia is home to more than 2,000 species of native bees. The newly-described bee is one of hundreds in the country that have not been named. Dr Prendergast said: "[There are] many native bees that have evolved in Australia. We don't even know the names of them. They haven't been described. We don't know their distribution or where they nest." The Lucifer bee is "the first new member of this bee group to be described in more than 20 years". She added that there is a lot of "life we still have to discover". Prendergast is worried that the endangered wildflower and the new bee "could be at risk from habitat disturbance and other threatening processes like climate change".
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