The insect from your nightmares is real: World's largest bee spotted last month

York Daily Record

Imagine a bee that is as at least an inch and a half long, has a tongue that's nearly an inch long with a giant pair of mandibles.

If you haven’t already run away screaming, what if this mythical insect wasn’t just a something you imagined in your nightmares?

The world's largest bee -- roughly the size of a human thumb -- has been rediscovered in a remote part of Indonesia in its first sighting in nearly 40 years, researchers said on February 21, 2019. Despite its conspicuous size, no one had observed Wallace's giant bee -- discovered in the 19th century by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and nicknamed the "flying bulldog" -- in the wild since 1981, the Global Wildlife Conservation said.

According to an NPR report, the Wallace’s giant bee is the world's largest been and has gone unseen for nearly 40 years. But, last month, the giant insect was spotted on an island of Indonesia.

The Wallace's giant bee — Megachile pluto — towers over European honeybees and has only been observed only a handful of times since it was discovered in the 1850s by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. When the bee was last rediscovered, in 1981, it had been presumed extinct.