Howdy BugFans,

Here are four articles about bugs from the excellent Smithsonian newsletter, which also covers archaeology, birds, current science news, creatures of the deep ocean, etc. Enjoy.

Many queen BUMBLE BEES overwinter in tunnels underground, and they develop these sites into nests in spring. What happens in wet spring?

Although preliminary reports say that MONARCHS overwintering in Mexico were found over a larger area this year than last year, there’s alarming news about some of our favorite insect ambassadors    

One problem with current surveys of insect species – indeed, surveys of any living thing – is that the people who conduct today’s counts may have little acquaintance with yesterday’s populations (remember all the bugs that used to hit the windshield in days of yore?). It’s called “Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS)” – what looks like a lot of butterflies may actually be only a fraction of what was counted 50 years ago. Insects are particularly susceptible to SBS because few people were interested enough in, say, bumble bees, a century ago to count them in any systematic way 

When asked what his studies had taught him about the nature of his Creator, the great British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”&�Բ�����;

The BugLady

The post Bugs in the News XV appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady keeps getting solicitations from a large, national conservation/environmental organization whose message is “Save the Bees.”&�Բ�����;Alas, the only bees they picture or mention are honey bees. Heaven knows that honey bees are vital pollinators, and they’re certainly facing big challenges, but the same can be said of our (apparently invisible) native bees.

Turns out that the unassuming Two-spotted long-horned bee (Melissodes bimaculatus) (bimaculatus means “two spots”) is a Pollinator Extraordinaire.

But first, the Family Tree.��TSLHBs are in the family Apidae – the Cuckoo, Carpenter, Digger, Bumble, and Honey Bees – and in the tribe Eucerini, the Longhorn bees, the most diverse tribe in the family.��Eucerini comes from the Greek��Eu,��meaning “good” or” true” and��keras, meaning “horn” and refers to the hefty antennae of the males.��There are about 215 species in the tribe in North America, and some bee people think that “The classification within the tribe is rather chaotic,” and that it is “in serious need of a thorough taxonomic overhaul.”��On top of that, the species can be hard to tell apart.��Many of the Eucerini are specialist feeders, and as such have names like Squash bee or Sunflower bee.��They’re important pollinators of sunflower, melon, and squash crops as well as both wild and garden flowers.

Long-horned bees are mid-sized (maybe a half-inch) and hairy, and many have abdomens ringed with yellow or white. Males have longer antennae than females –  – and females have thicker hair on their back legs (all the better to carry pollen with, my dear). They nest in vertical burrows in the ground, and they are solitary bees, but females of many species will tolerate other nests nearby, and males may rest overnight in amazing sleeping aggregations with other males.

There are around 100 species in the genus��Melissodes��(which means “bee-like”) in the US.��They are hairy and “robust” – about half-again the size of a honey bee (males are slimmer than females) – and many have blue or green eyes.��Most��Melissodes��species are specialist feeders, zeroing in on the flowers of a few species or genera in the Aster/Composite family.�� They’re most common in the second half of summer and early fall.

Their burrows are about the diameter of a pencil, often with a small mound of dirt around them, and the individual egg chambers are lined with a waxy material and provisioned with a ball of pollen and nectar. Females sleep in their burrows, but males gather with other males, often . In some species, males reuse the same “bedroom.”&�Բ�����;Professor Robbin Thorne, of the University of California, Davis, called these aggregations “Boys’ Night Out.”

TWO-SPOTTED LONG-HORNED BEES (TSLHBs) are found from Ontario and Idaho south to New Mexico and Texas, and east to the Atlantic. They like places with lots of flowers, including prairies and other grasslands, cities, and agricultural fields.

Males are fancy at the front end – except for some pale hairs on their rear set of legs, males are dark, but they have ��and long, reddish antennae.��Females are decorated toward the rear of the abdomen with two white spots, but her face is dark, and she has copious long, . Both are a half-inch-ish long, and she’s a bit larger than he is.

With a few differences, their biography mirrors that of most��Melissodes.��Males emerge from their natal tunnels first and patrol the flower tops, looking for females.��Females emerge and start looking for good nest sites.��Where other species prefer to tunnel in flat ground, the TSLHB likes banks and inclines.��She provisions a cell, lays an egg in it, seals it off, and starts working on the next cell.�� Although the species is common, their nest sites are rarely found (it’s suspected that they nest under bushes).��TSLHBs fly in mid-summer, and there’s one generation per year.

Unlike many in their genus, TSLHBs nectar at and females collect pollen from a wide variety of plants – wildflowers, garden flowers, “weeds,” and agricultural crops – and they start foraging early in the day. When the BugLady tried to check the full list of their food plants at the Discover Life website, she found this message, “On 16 February, 2025, Discover Life had 6.5 million hits, largely by about two million robots that greatly slowed our service to our human users. We’re trying to get rid of them and get our services back. Sorry.”

Cuckoo bees in the genus  find the tunnels of TSLHBs, enter them, and lay eggs in the cells. They are kleptoparasites – their larva will kill the Long-horned bee larva and eat the stored pollen.

Along with honey bees and common eastern bumble bees, TSLHBs are among the top three most important pollinators of cotton, and they also pollinate pumpkins, watermelons, and cucumbers.

According to the Tufts Pollinator Initiative, researchers have found TSLHBs on the male flowers of corn plants.��Pollen provides insects with fats, protein, carbs, and vitamins, though these ingredients are present in different proportions in different species of flower.��But corn is wind pollinated, not insect-pollinated, and insects have little access to the pollen-and-nectar-free female flowers that are found on small, silky ears in mid-stalk.��These bees not only like corn pollen, they seem to actively seek it out.��In the case of corn, the TSLHB is not a pollinator, it’s a pollen thief!

RABBIT HOLE DU JOUR

Not only do honey bees supply us with bees’ wax and honey, but bee pollination is a highly lucrative traveling show. They pollinate $15 billion worth of crops annually. Starting with the almond crop in California in early spring, hives are trucked around the country – north in spring and summer to pollinate about 125 kinds of nuts, fruits, and vegetables, producing honey as they go, and then back to Texas and Florida where they rest for the winter. It’s called “managed insect pollination,” and it supplements the efforts of the native pollinators (or vice versa). We’re talking tens of thousands of hives on the move, precisely choreographed to be delivered at the right blooming time for each crop. It’s great for the growers, but stressful for the bees.

There are also commercial bumble bee providers, because bumble bees are effective on about two dozen crops, including tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squashes, clovers (without bumble bees there would be no red clover), sunflowers, and some of the crops that are grown in greenhouses.

As always, the BugLady is pleased to recommend&�Բ�����;“The ID Guide of Wild Bees – New York” for .

��

BOTW will be Missing in Action on Egredior Day (March 4^th) (egredior is Latin for “to march forth”), so that the BugLady can have a body part replaced. Catch you later.

The BugLady

The post Two-spotted Long-horned Bee appeared first on Field Station.

June is waning, and pretty soon the BugLady will have to stop eating chocolates and watching soaps and get up off the couch and start writing. Actually, with a way warmer and wetter June than normal (more than 7” of rain at the BugLady’s house for the month), the trail hasn’t been as much fun as usual, and the bugs are slow to reappear (not surprisingly, she has gotten some nice dragonfly shots). 

So – your reading list for the week includes bumble bees, butterflies, leeches, and spiders.

��are sandwich plate-sized immigrants from East Asia that are making themselves at home in parts of the eastern part of the country.�� Although they are startling (to say the least), they are reportedly benign.�� It will be a while before they get here to God’s Country, but here’s one of our larger spiders, a slightly-related .

.

And they are specialized .

And .

And are big-time travelers, which was determined by an analysis of their pollen.

Stay cool,

The BugLady

The post Closed for June 4 – A Potpourri of Invertebrates appeared first on Field Station.

A pollinator is an animal (not all pollinators are insects) that visits flowers and carries their pollen to other flowers.�� Bees, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, and wasps are all practitioners to some degree.��Hummingbirds pollinate a few flowers (like wild columbine), and in the Southwest, a few bats do, too.��

We’re well into National Pollinator Week now, and the news isn’t wonderful, so the BugLady is off-setting it with pictures of some really spiffy pollinators.

How can we help insects, including pollinators? Plant an array of native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees that will bloom from spring through fall, reduce or eliminate pesticides, provide brush piles and other shelter, don’t be a tidy gardener, and set out a bird bath (birds will appreciate this, too). In Wisconsin, plug into our ��and monitoring programs.

Meanwhile – it’s National Pollinator Week – celebrate appropriately.

The BugLady

The post Closed for June 3 – More Pollinators appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady’s “newspaper clippings” file runneth over, so here are a few articles for you to peruse.�� Please note that most come from the excellent Smithsonian daily e-newsletter, which is not only free (though a donation is always appreciated), but there’s no pay wall. The newsletter includes articles about current discoveries, archaeology, history, insects, birds and mammals, oceans, etc.

THE BUGLADY KNOWS that she’s preaching to the choir, here – not to the folks who say “Fewer bugs?��That’s great!”��Anyone who likes to eat, who likes birds (and dragonflies!), and who appreciates our natural communities and ecosystems should be a fan of insects and other “bugs” and should be concerned about their .

IN A RELATED VEIN –��().

ALGORITHMS ARE EVERYWHERE.��Recipes are algorithms��(“an algorithm is a finite set of instructions carried out in a specific order to perform a particular task.”��Or solve a mathematical computation). Social media relies on algorithms to feed you content. Now it turns out that even .

ONE MEASUREMENT that the BugLady has always used to gauge insect numbers is the flurry of bugs around the porch light at night. Biographies of many insects, especially of moths, note whether they are attracted to light or not.��Scientists are figuring out what’s really happening (, too).

WE JUMP IN LAKE MICHIGAN on January 1 (well, some of us do) (but not the BugLady); Cordova, Alaska has an Ice Worm Festival. Whatever gets you through the winter. Supposedly, cold-blooded critters don’t do so well when temperatures get below about 40 degrees (warm-blooded animals use part of their daily energy/food budget to maintain a core heat, but cold-blooded animals are at the mercy of the ambient temperature).�� have a couple of tricks up their sleeves.��

Alas – we’ve��just��missed this year’s , but it’s not too early to start planning for 2025. ��

MONARCH WINGS –

IN THE “ALWAYS-TASTEFUL” CATEGORY: years ago, a colleague of the BugLady’s husband asked if mice pee.��Her husband knew that if he said yes, the man was going to go home and empty the cupboards and sterilize everything. So he said “No, the liquid is included in the mouse poop.” Do insects pee?��Many don’t, and “peeing” isn’t exactly the right name for it because they don’t have a separate exit just for liquids. Insects have structures (OK – Malpighian tubules) that collect liquid waste (uric acid and ammonia) and deposit it in the hind gut.��Terrestrial insects need to conserve water, so they reabsorb usable liquids from the hind gut and the rest gets mixed with the digestive wastes and excreted (“just like mice….”) (aquatic insects are constantly excreting liquid to keep from getting waterlogged).��

But – insects that suck sap have a different challenge.��Sap contains sugar in��very��small concentrations, so plant juice feeders have to take in a lot of liquid (about 300 times their body weight daily) in order to get enough calories, and it comes out under pressure.��. How do they handle it?��

FINALLY – in the “Better Late than Never” category – the BugLady posted an episode about caddisflies last week, and today BugFan Steve sent this great .

The groundhog did not see its shadow.��The way the BugLady learned it, if he sees his shadow, there are six more weeks of winter, and if he doesn’t, there’s a month and a half until spring (and insects). ��

The BugLady

The post Bugs in the News XIII appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans, 

A while back, BugFan Matt asked the BugLady if she had ever photographed a small bee on a Grass-of-Parnassus flower. Grass-of-Parnassus (not really a grass) is one of her favorite flowers (despite the fact that it shouts “Fall is coming!” every time she sees it). She photographs it a lot in the closing days of August, and it turned out that she had seen the bee, but she hadn’t realized how special it was. 

As BugFans will recall from those six weeks of mythology in high school English, Mount Parnassus was sacred to Apollo and was home to the Muses in Greek mythology. Allegedly, cattle on Mount Parnassus grazed on the plant, and so it was promoted to honorary grass status.   

Mining bees have been featured on these pages before. They are small and fuzzy and are among our earliest pollinators (the fuzz keeps them warm on chilly spring mornings). Some are catholic in their tastes (polylectic), but many species are linked to a single, small group of related plants (oligolectic), and some zero in on only a single species (monolectic). Many have no common name at all, but like the Parnassus miner bee, their scientific name may include a nod to their affiliated plant. 

They emerge when their host plants emerge, make tunnels a few inches deep in the ground, scoop out, waterproof, and provision chambers within them with pollen and nectar, and then install the next generation, which will overwinter underground and repeat the cycle when their flower reappears. The various species of mining bees and their flowers span the growing season, and late summer mining bee species are most often seen on goldenrod and on members of the carrot family. 

Except the PARNASSIA MINER BEES (Andrena parnassiae), which are found only where Grass-of-Parnassus lives – calcareous fens (another name for the plant is the Fen Grass-of-Parnassus) and other wet, alkaline meadows and wetlands.��They’ve been recorded in Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, New Jersey, and North Carolina. A journal article from the early 20^th��century said that the bee’s flight period went from August 25 to September 26, and that its only known Wisconsin occurrence was on the Lake Michigan bluffs in the Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay, on a plant that was misidentified, due to an error in an early botany reference, as Carolina Grass of Parnassus (which is found in Florida and the Carolinas).��

The hairs on their body act as pollen collectors, too, and they have pollen baskets on their back legs.  Parnassia Miner Bees only glean pollen from Grass-of-Parnassus flowers (and they are important pollinators of it – more about that in a sec), but the flowers are also visited by other bee species, syrphid and other small flies, ichneumon wasps, butterflies, (and the BugLady found a lightning beetle checking it), and by spiders with a taste for pollinators.    

When you (or a bee) look at the flower, what do you see? The green lines on the five petals are nectar guides, beckoning the bee to follow them to the nectar source. But the bee also notices a ring of 15 filaments at the base of the petals (actually five sterile stamens or staminoides, each divided into three prongs), each topped with what looks like a drop of nectar, resembling the (male) stamens of the flower. These are false nectaries that provide no nectar reward but serve to get the bee into the right vicinity – the real nectar lies at the base of the filaments. 

There are also five true stamens, each topped with a pollen-producing anther, and in the green center of the flower, the female flower parts – stigma, style and ovary (collectively called the pistil).

[Nota Bene: the BugLady learned just enough Botany in college to make it through the Botany final, and she’s been forgetting it ever since, so she has to pull up a chart on Wikipedia every time she tries to write about flowers.] 

The BugLady was wondering about the pedigree of Grass-of-Parnassus and she encountered some confusion about that. Several reputable sites reported that it was in the Saxifrage family, but another said that there was only a very distant familial connection. Others put it in the Staff tree family Celestraceae, and still others placed it in its own family Parnassiaceae (though it may be destined to rejoin the Celestraceae).   

Putting it all together: It’s a sweet little flower that has worked out some complex strategies to spread pollen and to avoid self-fertilization. Consider the five true stamens. Rather than maturing all at once, only one lengthens, matures and produces pollen per day, arcing over the top of the pistil. After the first day, its anther turns brown and the filament relaxes against the ring of petals, and another stamen grows and produces pollen.  

The pistil does not grow or become receptive to incoming pollen until after all five stamens have matured, making it impossible for the flower to self-pollinate. Eastman, in The Book of Swamp and Bog, says that the flowers exhibit protandry – that is, the flower, which has both male and female parts, is unisexually sequenced, the male parts completing their development before the female parts start. To put it another way, the flowers have a male phase and then a female phase.

When a bee is tempted by the beads of false nectar and orients itself to harvest some, it straddles an anther, and pollen is picked up by the hairs on its abdomen. When it visits the next flower, pollen is brushed off, hopefully onto a flower whose female parts are ready to receive it (“xenogamy” “stranger marriage” — a flower breeding not with itself but with another).  

Bryan Pfeiffer, naturalist and blogger (“Chasing Nature”) and Grass-of-Parnassus watcher, has written some very nice entries about his experiences with both the flower and the bee – here are two [ and .]

Xenogamy, polylectic, oligolectic, monolectic, staminoides, protandry, stamens and pistils and anthers, oh my – it’s January, time to dust off our brains. There will be a quiz. 

The BugLady

As a bit of lagniappe, .

The post Parnassia Miner Bee – a Bee and its Flower appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings of the Season, BugFans,

(13 bugs, because once she’s got her selection down to 13, the BugLady just can’t cut one more!)

A Cheery Thought for the Holidays, the average home contains between 32 and 211 species of arthropods (with the lower numbers at higher Latitudes and higher numbers as you head south past the Mason-Dixon Line). So, while the BugLady is celebrating The 12 (or 13) Bugs of Christmas, most BugFans could rustle up at least that many under their own roofs. Whether you see them or not, all kinds of invertebrates coexist with us daily, mostly staying under our radar until we surprise each other with a quick glimpse. 

Here are a baker’s dozen of the bugs that the BugLady saw in 2023.

BALTIMORE CHECKERSPOT CATERPILLAR – According to one researcher, caterpillars are&�Բ�����;“essentially bags of macerated leaves.” What kind of leaves does a Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillar macerate? The eggs are laid in the second half of summer on, historically, White turtlehead, a native wildflower, and more recently, Lance-leaved plantain has been added as a host plant. Both plants contain chemicals that make the caterpillars distasteful to birds, though the turtlehead has higher concentrations of them. The butterflies have adapted to use an introduced plant, but the caterpillars don’t do as well on it (the BugLady has also seen them on goldenrod). Half-grown caterpillars overwinter, and when they emerge to finish eating/maturing in spring, the turtlehead isn’t up yet, so they eat the leaves of White ash and a few spring wildflowers.       

LEAFCUTTER BEE ON PITCHER PLANT – Bumble bees and Honey bees are listed as the main pollinators of Purple pitcher plants, along with a flesh fly called the Pitcher plant fly (Fletcherimyia fletcheri), a pitcher plant specialist that contacts the pollen when it shelters in the flowers. But it looks like this Leafcutter bee is having a go at it. 

SEVEN-SPOTTED LADYBUGS had a moment this year; for a while in early summer, they were the only ladybug/lady beetle that the BugLady saw. Like the Asian multicolored lady beetle, they were introduced from Eurasia on purpose in the ‘70’s to eat aphids. But (and the BugLady is getting tired of singing this chorus) they made themselves at home beyond the agricultural fields and set about out-competing our native species. 

An Aside: Lots of people buy sacks of ladybugs to use as pest control in their gardens. The BugLady did a little poking around to see which species were being sold. Some sites readily named a native species, but most did not specify. Several sites warned that unless you are buying lab-grown beetles, your purchase is probably native beetles scooped up during hibernation, thus posing another threat to their numbers

SOLDIER FLY LARVA – The BugLady is familiar with Soldier fly larvae in the form of the flattened,  that float at the surface of still waters, breathing through a “tailpipe” and locomoting with languid undulations. So she was pretty surprised when she saw this one trucking handily across a rock in a quiet bay along the edge of the Milwaukee River. It appears to have been crawling through/living in the mud. 

COMMON WOOD NYMPH – And an out-of-focus Common Wood Nymph at that. The BugLady has a long lens, and her arms weren’t quite long enough to get the butterfly far enough away to focus this shot. And it’s really hard to change lenses with a butterfly sitting on your finger.

FALSE MILKWEED BUG – Milkweed bugs are seed bugs that live on milkweeds, but if you’ve ever seen a milkweed bug that was not on a milkweed (usually on an ox-eye sunflower), it was probably a False milkweed bug. They’re so easily mistaken for a Small milkweed bug that one  commentator said that all of their pictures of Small milkweed bugs should be reviewed. Here’s a with a single black heart on its back bracketed by an almost-complete orange “X”; and here’s the , whose markings look (to the BugLady) like an almost complete “X” surrounding two, nesting black hearts. One thoughtful blogger pointed out that although it looks like a distasteful milkweed feeder, it’s not thought to be toxic. He wondered if this is a case of mimicry, or if the bug once fed on milkweed, developed protective (aposematic) coloration, and then changed its diet?

LARGE EMPTY OAK APPLE GALL – That’s really its name, but “empty” refers to the  (which was made by this ). Galls are formed (generically) when a chemical introduced by the female bug that lays the egg, by the egg itself, and later by the larva, causes the plant to grow extra, sometimes bizarre, tissue at that spot. The gall maker lives in/eats the inside of the gall until it emerges as an adult. Some galls are made by mites – same principle.

SYRPHID FLIES are pretty hardy.��Some species appear on the pussy willows and dandelions of early spring, and others nectar on the last dandelions of late fall.��This one was photographed on November 17, on a sunny and breezy day with temperatures in the low 40’s, 12 feet off the ground, resting on the BugLady’s “go-bag” (the bag of extra clothes she carries up onto the hawk tower to deal with the wind chill).

WASP WITH SPIDER – The BugLady saw a little flurry of activity near an orbweaver web on her porch one day, but she got it backward. At first she thought that the spider had snagged the wasp (a Common blue mud dauber), but it was the wasp that hopped up onto the railing with its prey, part of the spider collection she will put together for an eventual larva.

SIX-SPOTTED TIGER BEETLES grace these collections perhaps more than any other insect, because – why ever not!

JUST-EMERGED DAMSELFLY – This damselfly was so recently emerged (possibly from the shed skin nearby) that its wings are still longer than its abdomen (basic survival theory says that you put a rush on developing the parts you might need most).��Will a few of the aphids on the pondweed leaves be its first meal?

This is either a GREEN IMMIGRANT LEAF WEEVIL () or the slightly smaller (and equally alien) PALE GREEN WEEVIL (). Whichever it is, it’s been in North America for a little more than a century. Bugguide.net calls them “adventive” – introduced but not well established. Eggs are laid in bark crevices or in the soil, and the larvae feed on roots. Adults eat young leaves, buds, and flowers of some hardwood, fruit, and landscape trees but are not considered big pests. Their lime-green color comes from iridescent, green scales.

And a DOT-TAILED WHITEFACE in a pear tree.

Have a Wonder-full New Year,

The BugLady

The post The 12 (or 13) Bugs of Christmas appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

BugFan Freda found and photographed this awesome bee in her pollinator garden in August. It’s a distinctive bee, and it has an interesting story.

The Sculptured resin bee is sometimes called the Giant Asian resin bee, but there are resin bees that are larger, and it’s not just in Asia anymore. It’s in the family Megachilidae – the Leafcutter, Mason, Resin, Mortar, Sharptail, and Woolcarder bees. 

Megachilids tend to be sturdy, medium-sized, mostly solitary bees that carry pollen in a mat of hairs called a scopa on the underside of their abdomen rather than on their legs like honey and bumble bees. They make egg chambers for their eventual young in pre-existing holes in the ground or in wood or other materials, and, depending on what group they’re in, they line the tunnels and seal the chambers with bits of leaf, plant resin, mud, or plant fibers (except for the Sharptail bees, Cuckoo leafcutter bees in the genus Coelioxys, which parasitize the nests of their Megachilid sisters). Adults eat pollen and nectar, and they provision their egg chambers with pollen. In many ways, the modus operandi of the Sculptured resin bee is similar to that of other family members.   

Sculptured resin bees (Megachile sculpturalis) are big/“giant” bees (females measure about an inch and males are smaller) with elongated bodies and with  (Megachile means “large jaws,”). Males have a . When they’re sitting on flowers, they hold their wings out to the sides in a “V.”&�Բ�����;According to one source, the “sculptured” part . 

They’re big and they look dangerous, but males can’t sting and although females can, they’d rather flee than fight (although one source mentioned that he was bitten rather sharply when he handled one, so…..don’t).   

They don’t come from here. They’re native to Japan and parts of eastern Asia, and they arrived on our shores (North Carolina), probably in wood, in 1994. They expanded their range to Alabama (1999), Canada (2002), Wisconsin (2004), Maine and Kansas (2008), and now they’re found in most states east of the Mississippi and a few that are west. They’ve also found their way to Europe. They like temperate zones, and researchers believe that they are likely to continue expanding throughout them.  Ecologists list their status as “adventive” – non-native and present but not established.   

The Megachilids are important pollinators, and Sculptured resin bees are no exception. Like other Megachilids, Sculptured resin bees are (Cool Science Word #1) “polylectic” – they collect pollen from a wide variety of flowers (43 species in the US).    

Male Sculptured resin bees create territories and chase other males out of them. About the genus Megachile,  says “The males of most species have enlarged light-colored front legs with a fringe of hairs and with odor glands. They use these features during . They partially cover the female’s eyes with the hairy legs and the odor glands are placed close to the female’s antennae.”&�Բ�����;

Sculptured resin bees are (Cool Science Word #2) a xylophilous (wood-loving) bee. Females create brood chambers in existing holes and crevices because although her large jaws are great for collecting resin and sap, they’re not so great for excavating in wood. The cells are formed from wood particles, mud, and plant resin and filled with pollen, and when she’s satisfied with the job, she lays an egg on the pollen, seals the cell, and starts making another, often constructing 8 or 10 cells per tunnel. The outside entrance to the tunnel may be sealed with a resin or mud cover. Even though she is a solitary bee, she will tolerate other bees nesting nearby. Her larvae feed in their cells throughout winter, pupate in them the following spring, and emerge in summer. 

So – is the Sculptured resin bee a good thing or a bad thing? 

Initial reactions were, “Hey – neat bee; it doesn’t seem to be bothering anything,” but any alien species has, of course, the potential to impact native species, whether through competition or spreading disease. Sculptured resin bees can be hard on the flowers they visit; there are reports of the bee damaging flower petals while foraging for pollen and nectar in a way that may make it harder for native bees to pollinate them. 

Yes, they are pollinators, but researchers have noted that, like many non-native pollinators, they visit native plants, but they prefer non-native plants that hail from their areas of origin (one of the plants they pollinate in the South is Kudzu).

And then there are the nest tunnels. Sculptured resin bees mostly use deserted tunnels, but not always. They’re known to evict Eastern carpenter bees from their nest tunnels rather aggressively and then to redecorate the brood chambers for their own eggs. There’s a potential for similar conflict with any bee that makes a similar-sized tunnel, and they can monopolize bee hotels (some experts recommend destroying Sculptured resin bee larvae in bee hotels). One source noted that they have been observed killing honey bees.  

Time will tell.

On a Lepidopteran note, it’s Wooly Bear season. Here’s the wooly bear BOTW, and a . 

The BugLady

The post Sculptured Resin Bee appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady is already fantasizing about warm, sunny days in a wetland, photographing Swamp milkweed (and dragonflies), because she loves its color, and she loves being in wetlands, and because it’s a very busy plant, indeed!  

Also called rose or red milkweed (there are a couple of species of southern milkweeds that are also called red milkweed), white Indian hemp, water nerve-root, and water silkweed, Swamp milkweed prefers damp soils and full sun near the water’s edge. 

Indians, and later, the European settlers, used it medicinally (a tea made from the roots was reputed to “drive the worms from a person in one hour’s time”). It was used with caution – its sap is poisonous – and the cardiac glycosides that protect Monarchs also deter mammals from grazing on all but the very young plants.��The fibers in its stem were twisted into rope and twine and were used in textiles.

Its flowers are typical milkweed flowers – a corona of five parts (hoods) with curved petals below and curved, nectar-secreting horns above.��The flowers are tricky – sticky, golden, saddlebag-shaped pollinia are hidden behind what one author calls a trap door (a��stigmatic slit).��Insects walk around on the flower head, and when one of their feet slips through the slit by chance, a pollinium sticks to it.��When the bug encounters a stigmatic slit on the next plant it visits, the pollen is inadvertently delivered.��A quick-and-dirty, pick-up and delivery is what the plant had in mind; but, like the story of the raccoon (or was it a monkey) that reaches into the jar for a candy bar and then can’t pull its fist out of the small opening, sometimes the insect’s foot gets stuck to pollinia inside the trap door. Insects that can’t free themselves will die dangling from the flower, and insects that escape may be gummed up by the waxy structures.�� Look carefully for pollinia in the pictures.

Milkweeds support complex communities of invertebrates – their nectar attracts ants, bugs, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps, plus predators looking for a meal.��Here are some of the insects that the BugLady sees on Swamp milkweed.

MULBERRY WING SKIPPER – A small (one-inch-ish wingspan) butterfly of wetlands with an arrow or airplane-shaped marking on its rich, chestnut-brown underwings ().��Adults fly slowly through low vegetation, where females lay their eggs on the leaves of sedges.��

FLOWER LONGHORN BEETLE��BRACHYLEPTURA��CHAMPLAINI��(no common name), on a Swamp milkweed leaf. Other than a “present” checkoff in a variety of natural area insect surveys, there’s just about nothing online about this beetle, and not much more in Evans’ book,��Beetles of Eastern North America. It’s a long-horned beetle in the Flower longhorn subfamily��Lepturinae, a group that feeds on pollen in the daytime. This one has pollinia on its mouthparts.

Also seen were ants, leafcutter bees, sweat bees, Great black wasps, Great golden digger wasps, Red soldier beetles, Fiery and Broad-winged Skipper butterflies, and Thick-headed flies.  

The BugLady

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Howdy, BugFans,

Wisconsin is home to between 500 and 600 species of wild bees, ranging in size from today’s sweat bee to bumble bees many times larger (there are about 4,000 bee species in the US). If a small brown or green bee landed on your arm and started sipping salt while you were working/sweating outside in the summer, you’ve met a sweat bee. Typically, no one is harmed in these encounters unless you brush the bee away roughly.   

The BugLady’s husband was allergic to sweat bees, but when he went to the allergist to see if desensitization shots were available, the doctor said “What’s a sweat bee?”&�Բ�����; Which didn’t bode well for any shots. 

Sweat bees can be a bear to differentiate (as one site warned, “Many species won’t be identifiable from photos”), and a microscope is needed to tell some species apart. Still, this is a seriously tiny sweat bee with an unusual color. So, the BugLady finds herself back out on that taxonomic limb again, but she’s gotten comfortable out there over the years, and she’s calling this one a Golden green sweat bee.    

Golden green sweat bees (Augochlorella aurata) are one of about 100 species in Wisconsin in the family Halictidae, the Sweat, Furrow, Nomiine, and Short-faced Bees. Augochlor is a Greek prefix meaning “intensified gold-green,” and “aurata” means “gilded” or “golden.”&�Բ�����;Despite their name, most Golden green sweat bees are quite , but some are , some are , some are , and some are . They are about one-fifth of an inch long, with females slightly longer than males. 

Here are some Extreme Macros – [ (also available on eBay as a headshot), , and ]

They have a patchy northern range mostly east of the Rockies, and of the seven Augochlorella species in North America, Golden green sweat bees are found the farthest north. They are common in fields in eastern North America, where they are generalist pollinators that forage on flowers in a bunch of different plant families. Along with wildflowers, they also pollinate agricultural crops like apples, strawberries, alfalfa, tomatoes, and sunflowers. They .

The vast majority of bees, including many of the Halicitdae and some of the Augochlorella, are solitary rather than communal bees – single Moms who create and provision egg chambers without the help of workers. Golden green sweat bees are flexible about the idea – at higher latitudes and altitudes (areas that have shorter growing seasons), they tend to be more solitary, but when they’re in warmer climes, they are called “primitively eusocial.”&�Բ�����;Eusocial describes the most advanced social behavior – think ant hill – characterized by cooperative brood care, overlapping generations within a colony, division of labor (castes), and reproductive and non-reproductive individuals.  

In favorable climates, the fertile female overwinters and starts the colony in spring, excavating a nest tunnel (), collecting pollen and fashioning it into pollen balls for her young, and laying six to eight eggs that will produce both males and females. Newly hatched males leave the nest, but newly-hatched females become workers that care for the queen. Later in the season, she produces another small batch of males and females that will fly out and mate in fall. A fertile female will dig down into the lowest/warmest part of the nest and hunker down until May, and the beat goes on.  

Nest are dug in bare ground in woods and fields and can be as deep as 10 inches. The Vermont Center for Ecostudies Vermont Atlas of Life site included a picture of a nest entrance with a turret around the opening, but the BugLady .

Neat picture of a . About the picture, entomologist Eric Eaton wrote. “It might be that the rain dissolved honeydew that had accumulated on the leaf.”

Here’s a great source of information about bees, though , and vice versa. Check the Wild Bee ID guide tab. 

The BugLady

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