Scientists studied Colletes inaequalis bees in eastern Tennessee in March 2023. They found the bees create a flexible, plastic-like nest lining. The team said the material “was quite flexible and could be folded without noticeable fracture or deformation.” Later, the lining naturally broke down in the soil after 11 months.
In March 2023, a team of scientists travelled to eastern Tennessee, the U.S., trowels in hand, and dug a few centimetres into the earth to follow small tunnels into nests created by a ground-nesting bee, Colletes inaequalis . They collected the translucent cell lining of the nests and transported it on ice to a lab, for a reason: to test its unique composition.
At the peak of an active nesting period, they found the lining, much like synthetic polyester, “was quite flexible and could be folded without noticeable fracture or deformation,” the scientists said in their paper., published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When the team returned to the bee nests the next year and tested the lining again — which now contained pollen and late-stage larvae — they found it had cracked and crumbled. Specifically, they found the nest linings 11 months after they were built to have suffered “significant degradation,” with the polyester content falling from 73% to 40% in four months in ambient soil.