There's always the chance you might just find something new and make a name for yourself. Of course we'd all heard about Ngoro but had never taken it seriously, I mean, we're scientists, right! But then John, he's my assistant, he was sitting in the compound one day, chatting, and he looks down casually at his can of beer and, just for a second, there it was, 'Ngoro Tak' large as life. So that's how it started."

I next spoke to John Carson, Dr Turners assistant, and asked him how they caught their first living example.
"We thought it was going to be easy. Ever since the day I saw it, that's all we could think about. Who's going to get it? Every day, all day. Obsessed? Yeah, you could say we were obsessed. But when we finally got one, wow! What a high."

"Anyway. We had been trying to catch a 'Tak' for weeks with no success. No matter where, when or how we tried, we just couldn't get close to one. We found a hive, which we are pretty certain belongs to 'noverans' because of two dead bees we found inside, and it was in beautiful condition but abandoned for some reason."

"We tried rigging 'misties', they're very fine nets you hang in the trees. You catch all sorts in them, spiders, beetles, flies, bats, birds, even small monkeys sometimes. You have to hang around and check them regular, otherwise your prisoners start rioting and doing each other in, but we never got the bee."

"We used gas. You know. You pump CO, carbon monoxide from the exhaust of an engine, up into the canopy and catch what falls down. Still zilch! Nada! We were all hatching hare-brained schemes and running off into the jungle, convinced we'd sussed it. It was a miracle nobody got killed, mind you a few did get pretty badly hurt , but that's par for the course out here. Anyway, as I was saying, we'd been trying for weeks. Eventually Sally called a halt. We were all so strung out. She suggested we all take a day off and just sit around, chill. That was when it happened."

"As I remember it, and it's kinda hazy, me and Terry were playing drinking games. The kind where you line up the shots, and then say go, and drink them fast as you can, turning over the glasses as you go. That's when Terry caught the first one. Under a glass. Just like that! When we realised what we'd got, we were shaking. We carefully transfered the bee to a more suitable container, and just all stood there looking at it and praying that it wouldn't die of a Bourbon overdose."