They were discovered not on expedition but among specimens already in museum collections. Comparing them with all other bees was made vastly easier by the Digital Bee Collection Network, a hive (if you will forgive us) of information derived from 700,000 bee specimens in a dozen different collections around the world.

One of the new species, originally collected in both of the city’s major botanical gardens, has been christened with a name for New York — Gotham — that dates back to Washington Irving. It is called Lasioglossum gotham, which makes it a “hairy-tongued Gothamite.” And like the 10 other new species, it is a sweat bee, attracted to the salt in human perspiration. This is one of the few Linnaean names we know of that alludes to our fair city. (There is a tiny freshwater crustacean called Bryocamptus newyorkensis, which ranges as far afield as Louisiana.)

As one bee expert writes, sweat bees are “morphologically monotonous” — which is a way of saying they all look a lot alike. What makes these newly identified urban species remarkable is their habitat — the city itself. It is a reminder that nature is deeper and more intricate, with far more niches for life, than we can imagine.