For the #SciArtSeptember prompt “metallic” my linocut Osmia lignaria, the metallic blue orchard mason bee.
We think of bees as living in hives, but these bees live in reeds or natural holes which they divide into chambers with mud walls. We also tend to picture yellow and black stripes, but this small bee is blue to blue-green. 🧵1/2
Yesterday I witnessed a behaviour I never expected from a solitary bee: she unloaded all its pollen baskets onto a leaf, then tasted it, and soon after flew off, releasing a cloud of pixie dust as she jumped and beat its wings down to take off. As if she had had a change of heart, and the pollen wasn't good enough?
To be clear, I have never seen a bee unload its pollen baskets—ever. This they only do deep inside their nests to provision a new cell for an egg. And I say this having photographed thousands of solitary bees over the last 5 years. #nativebees
Is it possible to have a statement plant in your landscape that supports pollinators and can stand up to hot, dry weather?
Yes! In the Americas, consider Tithonia or Mexican Sunflower. It goes by other names, but you can get versions that grow over 6 feet (2M) tall and have 3-4 inch (10+cm) flowers like my pic here from a couple of days ago. What color!
Interessant ist hier nicht nur die #Hornisse mit der erbeuteten Honigbiene sondern auch, dass auf dem letzten Bild eine Nistfliege (#Milichiidae), oder auch Futterdiebsfliege genannt, ihr Glück versucht.
@Natur Thanks for the zoom in! I only ever notice whether a wasp is stylopized a posteriori, when looking at photos; often it's experts who pointed it out to me. In the spur of the moment it's not something one thinks about.
Some are quite extreme in how much the tergite is pushed out of its natural position. Most obvious is the bee, a Hylaeus, perhaps because of the color contrast: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89223666
Velvet ants are solitary wasps with hardened exoskeletons and often very powerful and painful venom; they hunt viciously, accumulating paralised prey in burrows where they lay their eggs. The hatching larvae will eat the prey alive.
This one showed herself a great digger. Dug multiple times, a few seconds at a time, as if looking for something. How bees and wasps manage to dig so effectively never ceases to amuse me.
There aren’t many solitary bees this late in the season in coastal Southern California, but perhaps because it rained so much and the fields are in blossom, here and there—very sparsely— I’ve spotted some.
Went out to check out the pollinator garden (I go out to visit 3x a day at least adding iNaturalist observations), saw a few dragonflies fighting over territory there (nice) spotted an Eastern leaf-footed bug (Leptoglossus phyllopus) and a Megachile sp. bee posed for me.
A little community #sciArt#scicomm - I made a version of my leadcutter bees print with two #linocut wild bees (Megachile relativa and Megachile brevis) and leaf prints for the Coxwell Pollinator Gardens! These prints are both about, and a sort of collaboration with leafcutter bees! These small, but multifarious native bees are important pollinators,
Anthophora curta (possibly), napping on a rock by a patch of yellow buttercups it was patrolling incessantly. By the beach at Santa Barbara, California.
I've been waiting for some time to get this particular photo. But this morning- success!
This is one of our more common native bees, the ligated furrow bee Halictus ligatus. Although I have photos of this species already, I didn't have any that clearly showed the diagnostic backwards-pointing tooth on the back of the head. But here it is, in stark silhouette, and I'm quite pleased.
Sweat bees are quite common here in Canada, and they are known to lick the sweat (salt) from people's skin. If this happens to you, feel lucky that you fed a sweat bee! Here is a sweat bee on a mint plant in our backyard.
For #PollinatorWeek: lino block print with collaged Japanese washi papers on a white mulberry leaf paper with bark inclusions shows blossoming cherry branches and two of our wild, native bees: the bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) and the Blue Orchard Mason Bee (Osmia lignaria). I printed it by hand on 16" x 20" with various collaged Japanese washi papers for the blossoms, bee bodies and wings.