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.
I decided to take part in #inkober2024 and to make it a #beetober on my blog. The first drawing is a bit cheated, as I’m in a train and have only a gel pen with me, so it’s not exactly ink drawing.
Topic of day 1 is: backpack. What can it have in common with bees? Some do carry tiny backpacks, thanks to the curious scientists who want to know where they are going! Larger species, like honeybee or bumblebees, can be equipped with little transponders which allow to track their movements with the radar. Scientists can follow each individual bee and see where and when it forages. Crazy, isn’t it? 🙂
f you want to see how bee backpacks look in real life, check this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237085202_Unravelling_the_mechanisms_of_trapline_foraging_in_bees
Road verges are often buzzing with pollinators. If they are rarely mowed, or even consist of sown flowers, they provide food for bees, butterflies and others. But living by a road has its disadvantages. One of them is a risk of being hit by car when crossing the road. I don’t know whether costs or benefits of flowering road verges for pollinators prevail, the review I read on the topic was inconclusive. Anyway, I would not sow flowers on the highway median strip.
I just read in some paper that female bees cache pollen and nectar for their offspring. Usually underground, of course.
Another cartoon about pollen specialist bees, that is, species where females collect pollen exclusively from a certain group of plant species. Viper’s bugloss mason bees (Hoplitis adunca and H. anthocopoides) are examples of such specialists. They both are native to Europe and some neighbouring regions but H. anthocopoides can now be found also in North America where it was introduced.
Some bee species look very similar to each other, so much that sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart even by professionals. It’s interesting that sometimes they look alike but differ in their biology. For example, Andrena afzeliella and Andrena ovatula, thought to be one species until recently, have distinct food preferences. The former prefers flowers of Fabaceae but likes many different species of this family, the latter’s diet is restricted to bushes belonging to this family, like gorse.
Young bumblebee queens spend a few days feeding and looking for a male to mate. Then, they don’t wait for winter to come but dig a hibernaculum and go to sleep – sometimes as early as June!
The European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) lines her nest with hairs scrapped off the plants like Stachys byzantina or Helichrysum arenarium. Females can be seen with balls of wool under their abdomen, when they carry it back to the nest.
Bumblebees are animals of colder climates than most bees, and climate change can affect them negatively in various ways. One of dangers are heatwaves. They can not only simply kill the individuals but also impair their memory.
The majority of bee species nest in the ground. Sometimes a bee chooses a flower pot as her nesting site, digs a tiny burrow and lays her eggs inside. She doesn’t harm plants in the process. If you are a poor gardener, you still have chance for a potted bee – they often prefer pots without much plants and with bare earth inside. Of course they should also have access to some food plants nearby. In areas with seasonality, a pot inhabited by bees should be left outside for winter because they need low temperatures to develop and time their emergence properly.
In my own balcony flower pots the leafcutter bees (Megachile) have been nesting since a few years. Many members of this genus line their nests with cutted leaf parts, so I can see how they repeatedly come home with leaf pieces in their mandibles.
Can you believe that I couldn’t find a photo of the vulture bees which I would trust is properly identified?? So maybe the bee on the cartoon is not a proper necrophagous stingless bee, I apologize for that and if you have a photo of one of the necrophagous bee species, please share it with me!
The vast majority of bees can be considered vegans. Their food, both as larvae and as adults, come exclusively or almost exclusively from flowers. Of course, in biology exceptions are very common 😉 Probably the most notable exception from the vegan-bee-rule are three species of Trigona, called ‘vulture bees’, which feed on carrion. Their ancestors were “ordinary” bees visiting flowers but they specialized in this unusual type of food.
Bees might also feed on honeydew and human tears (which still would make them vegetarian, in contrast to the vulture bees), and maybe they’ll also be portrayed on Non-honey bees some day 🙂
Non-honey bees 