Einstein and bees, or rather McGregor, is a hot topic, maybe you want to read this blog. For our bee we focus on the color! While wasps come with bright yellow stripes, honey bees are usually a bit less colorful, some only dark brown, some with a pale yellow. Sometimes the legs full of pollen (and by the way that is what distinguishes a bee from a wasp!) are pretty yellow. But did you know that there are actually lots of colorful bees? I remember seeing the first blue banded bee, and it made me want to calibrate my eyes. It is kind of unreal! Plus these bees are pretty large compared to other insects that land on flowers, so they are an absolute looker!
BBB hovering BBB slurping
Such a special-looking bee must be easy to identify I thought. Yes, it isn’t. The genus Amegilla has so many species (over 250, not sure how many are blue banded though) that they were further divided into the eleven sub-genera (not genuses) (that’s becoming a running gag now, few month ago I didn’t know they have that at all). A lot of information can be found hier and hier. I decided mine is not A. korotnensis because it seems too blue. There is also A. cingulata (more greenish, and andrewsi) which look very similar. How surprising that there are so many unique Blue banded bee species! As always, no guarantee on the ID, my pictures do not nearly show the details you would need to see for an ID!
As if the color wouldn’t be cool enough, these bees belong to a group of buzz pollinating bees, what means they vibrate to shake off pollen from the flower. I’m sure we all have that busy high-pinched buzzing sound in the ear now! Bumblebees do that in foxglove flowers too.
And another famous and cute behavior on top of it: The blue banded bees live solitary, and it might happen that they stay out too late and won’t be able to fly home. But since no one is waiting there, they just sleep outside. Dangerous you say, yes, so what they do is this: they use their teeth to minimize the contact area with the branch they sleep on. They literally sleep biting a branch, mostly male bees by the way. I don’t have a picture, but there are many out there, here for example. Imagine to wake up after such intense sleep bruxism! Ouch!
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