A small Australian bee that has not been seen in New Zealand since the early 1960s has been rediscovered in Christchurch community gardens, with University of Canterbury researchers confirming more than a dozen specimens collected across the city and as far south as Lincoln.
The bee, Leioproctus launcestonensis, is roughly six to eight millimetres long, mostly black with sparse white hairs, and carries a distinctive orange-red patch that sits like a shoulder pad above each wing. That patch is the easiest way to tell it apart from the small native bees that share its size class.
Ava Taylor-Johnson, a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, was leading a citizen science project on urban pollinators when the first specimens turned up. Community gardeners were uploading photographs of bees to a dedicated app, and Taylor-Johnson noticed an unfamiliar species cropping up in posts going back to 2021. She collected live specimens and sent them to the Bioeconomy Science Institute, where DNA testing confirmed the identification.
“But it hasn’t been seen since and it was formerly thought that the bee hadn’t actually spread around, but now we’ve found it across the city,” Taylor-Johnson told RNZ.
The species was first recorded in Christchurch in the early 1960s, almost certainly arriving as a stowaway in plant material or freight from Tasmania, where it is widespread. After that single record it disappeared from the scientific literature, and entomologists assumed any founding population had either died out or stayed confined to a tiny pocket of suburb that nobody happened to survey.
What Taylor-Johnson found instead was a bee that has quietly established itself across multiple Christchurch suburbs and pushed twenty kilometres south into Lincoln. Populations distributed over that area, and across multiple seasons of citizen science records, suggest the species is reproducing in the wild rather than persisting on occasional new arrivals from across the Tasman.
The Bioeconomy Science Institute confirmed the bee is not considered a biosecurity threat. Related Leioproctus species are recognised as excellent crop pollinators, and there is no evidence the newcomer competes aggressively with native bees for nesting sites or forage. Like New Zealand’s native bees, it is a solitary ground-nesting species rather than a hive builder, which means it does not produce honey or behave defensively the way honeybees and bumblebees can.
That solitary lifestyle is exactly why most New Zealanders have never noticed it, or any of the country’s native bees. Honeybees and bumblebees were introduced from Europe in the nineteenth century and dominate the public idea of what a bee looks like. New Zealand’s twenty-eight indigenous bee species are smaller, less hairy, do not swarm, and tend to nest in solitary burrows in dry banks and bare soil rather than in colonies. They are also overlooked in pollination research, even though they were here doing the job for millions of years before the first European hives arrived.
Taylor-Johnson said the rediscovery underlines how much we still do not know about pollinator populations in urban areas. Her broader PhD project is examining how the diversity of green spaces in a city, from heavily managed lawns to weedy verges and unpruned community plots, affects which pollinators turn up and stick around. The Christchurch result is an early indication that even unglamorous patches of urban ground can support species that have slipped under the radar for decades.
The use of citizen scientists was central to the discovery. Community gardeners and home growers across Christchurch had been uploading bee photographs to a project app for several years before the unfamiliar species was flagged. Taylor-Johnson reviewed posts going back to 2021, identified the candidate sightings, and only then went out to collect specimens for confirmation. Without that backlog of uploaded images the rediscovery would almost certainly have taken much longer.
For backyard gardeners in Canterbury, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Leaving patches of bare, dry, north-facing soil, planting flowering natives such as manuka, kanuka and rata, and avoiding broad-spectrum insecticides all support solitary bee populations. Bees from the Leioproctus family forage on a wide range of flowering plants, including stone fruit, brassicas and many garden ornamentals, so a Christchurch property that is friendly to native pollinators is also likely to host the rediscovered Australian arrival.
The next step for the research team is mapping the population’s full extent and checking whether it has spread beyond Canterbury. Anyone who has photographed an unfamiliar small black bee with an orange shoulder mark in their garden is encouraged to upload the image to one of the public biodiversity apps used by the citizen science project, with as much information about location and date as possible.
What’s your experience with native and introduced bees in your garden? Have you noticed unfamiliar species turning up over the past few years? Let us know in the comments.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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