Bees

I have a new friend.

He is a valley carpenter bee Xylocopa varipuncta.  Xylocopa means carpenter, and varipuncta means very punctual.  He visits every day before dusk, hovering around the tulsi trying to steal some pollen.  He is a big bee, about as big as my thumb.  One of the biggest bees in California!  I wonder if he is displaced from Holy Jim Canyon.  Or maybe a neighboring human installed a passionflower.

He is very fast so my photos are not very clear.  Luckily, better entomologists have closeup shots of this adorable insect.

Dare I say, this may be the best bee?

Unlike bumblebeetles, bees have amazing flight capability.  This massive carpenter bee is no exception.  My bee friend rarely stops to rest on the plant when he visits.  He just hovers and zips, hovers and zips.  Like a hummingbird!  It's hard to believe such a large insect can get so much metabolic energy from pollen.  Who knew plant jizz was so nutritious?  This bee is about as big as a fig beetle yet much more precise in his movement.  A breeze or a passing human barely perturbs his work.  Beautiful busy bee.

There were other bees at the tulsi in the morning.

I think these are leafcutter bees of the genus Megachile.

I think this is a small carpenter bee, like 100 times smaller than the valley carpenter bee.  The tiny tulsi flowers attracts all kinds.  I thought these tiny bees were flies!

This should be common knowledge, but I had no idea bees were so diverse.  Usually when you think of a bee, you think of a European honey bee.  But flowering plants and pollinators evolved almost everywhere on the planet.  And holy basil brings in many varieties.  I wonder if that has something to do with how the plant became holy.

Carpenter bees and fig beetles, both large buzzing, flying insects mistaken for bumblebees.  The beetle has elytra which are certainly tougher than the bee's exoskeleton, but this also hampers mobility.  The beetle can fly but rarely in a direct path.  Its vision cannot keep up with the bees.

A bee's vision is insane.  It has three tiny eyes in its forehead.  These are light-sensitive dots, and maybe the bee uses them to visually sense its direction and orientation.  Then you have the two massive compound eyes with thousands of facets, each containing a cluster of photoreceptors to differentiate between colors.  They can't see as many reds as humans can, but bees can see further into the violet and ultraviolet.

One more amazing thing about bees is their memory.  Everybody knows that honey bees are amazingly social.  Eusocial insects, which form organized societies with class structure, include ants, bees, and wasps.  But not all bees and wasps are eusocial!  In fact, none of the bees in these photos are eusocial.

To close it off, here are a couple bumblebee pics from Colorado: