Have you seen any of these videos where a bird (eg a kestrel or a kingfisher, or even a hen) keeps its head still when flying or sitting on a moving branch? Bees also have this kind of optic stabilization. When they fly, their thorax might rotate but head keeps being oriented horizontally. Here you can find an example of studies on this topic.
My association with this topic was remote control. Well, this kind of control might be not exactly remote, as it’s about a parasite controlling behaviour of its host. Apocephalus borealis, a fly, makes its bee host into a kind of zombie. It is known to parasitize bumblebees but a paper from 2012 reported it parasitising also the honeybee.
What bees grab when they’re hungry and busy? Mostly nectar. In general, the majority of bees feed on nectar and pollen, but the latter is consumed mainly by developing larvae, as it contains much protein and other substances essential for growth. Adults need mostly sugars to get energy for flying and doing everything they need to do. They consume pollen, too (females need it for producing eggs!) but in smaller quantities than their kids.
There could be only one bee today!… Well, one of over 800 bees, in fact. This is the number of members of the genus Nomada. These bees are cuckoos, their progeny develops in the nests of other bee species, for example mining bees (Andrena). I’m quite not sure where does the genus name come from. Is it because the bees don’t have their own ‘homes’, as they don’t build nests?
Bees love sun, of course! If you want to go bee-watching, it’s best to choose a warm, sunny day without much wind.
But… do you remember that one bumblebee who likes rain? It was on the blog quite a while ago 🙂
In #beetober it will be (hitch)hike.
Surely you saw bumblebees with small brownish “dots” in their hair. You might think that they are varroa but they’re not. Varroa is a parasite which attacks presently only honeybees. Those bumblebee “dots” are mites, too, but they don’t suck their haemolymph or do any harm – in this life stage they are just hitchhiking to the bumblebee nest. Inside a bumblebee colony, they often are harmless or even beneficial, eating debris or hunting for harmful mite species. So, you don’t need to worry about a bumblebee carrying mites on her.
#inktober aka #beetober day 7, passport. Why not picture a bee which is crossing many country borders recently? Halictus scabiosae, a species expanding its range with impressive speed, according to some sources even 50 km/year.
Today’s #inktober word is #binoculars. Well, that was easy one 🙂
Binocular microscope is very useful tool when you want to identify bees. Many bee species are, unfortunately, hard or impossible to identify to species without looking at them in magnification. That’s one of the reasons why entomological work involves much catching and killing. However, field identification of bees is increasingly more popular (thanks to, among others, many wildlife photographers and citizen scientists), and I believe it will be more and more developed, as new diagnostic traits visible in live specimens will be sought, allowing to identify more species without killing or even catching. Fingers crossed 🙂
#inktober, #beetober or #inktobee day 4: exotic
Exotic species are those which are not native for a given area but were introduced (puorposefully or accidentally) by humans. In Europe, we have at least one such species: Megachile sculpturalis, which was once a guest on this fanpage. Today I chose the European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) which is not exotic for me – in Poland it is common native species – but was introduced to North America and is considered invasive alien species there.
This bee is mostly described as having trousers not boots on her legs but I decided that’s close enough 
Genus Dasypoda – Pantaloon bee in English, Hosenbiene in German, obrostka in Polish, all these names (including scientific one) refer to extremely hairy hindlegs of females. And how is this genus called in your language?
PS I invented another # for #beetober: #inktobee
Each year new bee species are described. There are also discoveries of new species for a country or region. On the cartoon you can see the ivy bee (Colletes hederae), whom you might remember from my older blog posts. This species is currently expanding its range in Europe, and discovered in the areas where it has never been seen previously. But there is also a quite interesting story of its discovery as a new species. It was described as late as 1993, even though it is a species living not in remote tropical areas, but in well-studied areas of Europe. It simply was thought to be a strange, late-flying individuals of other Colletes species, with a soft spot for ivy. Thanks to Schmidt and Westrich it was raised to the range of species.
Non-honey bees 