Augochlorella Aurata: The Tiny Green Gold Sweat Bee

This lovely tiny bee is only 1/4 inch long. Augochlorella aurata is another one of the  ancient family of Hallictid “sweat” bees but much smaller than my cheeky little Agapostemon from a couple of weeks ago.  I am sure I would never have seen it in the wild but this bee came to me in a fascinating selection of native research bees very kindly sent to me by Sam Droege who works at the excellent Patuxent Wildlife Research Centre in Maryland.

The centre is an important international research facility for wildlife science, helping improve the understanding of native species and natural resources.  
Do visit their comprehensive and fascinating website that has so much information about wildlife in general and the interesting history of the centre, here.
We may think that concern about our native species and agriculture is fairly new but back in 1934 the centre was set up under the direction of the appropriately named Mr. J. N. Darling,

“The original idea of the station visualized a demonstration area stressing the importance of the relationship of wildlife to agriculture.”

Sam Droege is, amongst other things, involved in the development of online identification guides to North American bees and the development of monitoring programs for native bee species. He contributes to the excellent Discover Life site who are also organising BEE HUNT next year… get involved if you can. 

Some facts about the Augochlorella

CLASS: Insecta
ORDER: Hymenoptera, Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies.
SUPERFAMILY: Apoidea. Bees and some wasps.
FAMILY: Halictidae (Sweat Bees)
GENUS: Augochlorella
SPECIES: Augochlorella aurata

They are common throughout all of the USA and can be seen  from April-October. They are nesting bees, eusocial and will burrow in rotting wood or well drained soil.
To encourage them, grow native Dogbane Apocynum cannabinum, Fleabane Erigeron strigosus, Slender Mountain Mint Pycnanthemum tenuifolium and the Goldenrods Solidago odora, Euthamia graminifolia.
In return they will pollinate your peppers, strawberries, tomatoes, and watermelons

The bees vary in colour considerably. Sam’s bee is a fugitive dark bronze, clad in gold/green armour, looking black until it just catches the light and changing with every different direction you look at it.. aurata indeed!

What’s in a name… just for those like me who are fascinated by the etymological origins of the beautiful words that we give our biological and botanical friends :.. Aug.. to enhance, Latin; Chlorella from the Greek word chloros meaning green and ella, the diminutive; Aurātus ‘gilded, golden’, perfect passive participle of aurō ‘gild, overlay with gold’, from aurum ‘gold’.
How very beautiful…

A sketch for the pose..

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Tiny Green Gold Sweat Bee: Augocholrella Aurata

Watercolour on Arches HP. image size 3.5”

Anna’s Anthidium: Bee No 12:The Wool Carder Bee

Over the last few weeks I have been writing to various people to get some help with my bee paintings. I like to work from real models if possible and thought one way round this was to beg or borrow some spare bees from researchers. Anna from Anna’s Bee World who I have mentioned before and who helped me with the blue wasp identification has very kindly sent me a couple of samples, one of which was this beautiful Anthidium. It is wonderful to have such good reference. Thank you Anna.

Seeing these striking black and yellow markings, you could be forgiven for thinking this bee was a wasp. This is the Wool Carder Bee, Anthidium sp so called because they “card” the wooly covering from leaves to use as nest material. The female has five sharp teeth on her mandibles with which she bites through the downy fibers. She then rolls them into a ball, tucks it under her body and carries it back to the nest .

‘A female Anthidium manicatum commences cropping the woolly tomentum of a leaf ‘ from a series of photos by Neil Robinson BWARS here.

There is a very good article about Anthidium manicatum from Insectpix.net here

These bees are members of the Megachile family whose females carry pollen on the underside of the abdomen in the scopa (stiff hairs). This is quite different from other bees who carry the pollen on their hind legs. The male bees are territorial and armed with three spikes at the end of their abdomen. They will use these to deter other insects while patrolling their patch and keeping a lookout for females. They nest in pre existing cavities, often in old plant stems, laying eggs in their downy nests and providing pollen balls for the hatched larvae.

I am always struck by the lack of affectionate writing about nature these days. Books and websites tend to be either simply factual or rather vague. I generally try to find good writing from an earlier time where there is still that sense of wonder. It was nice to discover that the great writer and entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre shared my view!

He was criticised by his contemporaries for his gentle and colloquial style of writing.. here is his excellent reply:

“Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure.”

and here he writes about the Little Wool Carder Bee, which he calls the Cotton Bee:

We have but to see the nest of a Cotton-bee to convince ourselves that its builder cannot at the same time be an indefatigable navvy. When newly-felted and not yet made sticky with honey, the wadded purse is by far the most elegant known specimen of entomological nest-building, especially where the cotton is of a brilliant white… No bird's-nest, however deserving of our admiration, can vie in fineness of flock, in gracefulness of form, in delicacy of felting with this wonderful bag, which our fingers, even with the aid of tools, could hardly imitate, for all their dexterity. I abandon the attempt to understand how, with its little bales of cotton brought up one by one, the insect, no otherwise gifted than the kneaders of mud and the makers of leafy baskets, manages to felt what it has collected into a homogeneous whole and then to work the product into a thimble-shaped wallet. Its tools as a master-fuller are its legs and its mandibles, which are just like those possessed by the mortar-kneaders and Leaf-cutters; and yet, despite this similarity of outfit, what a vast difference in the results obtained!

Fabre wanted to try to see how the bees manipulated the wool to make the nest and so replaced their reed homes with glass rods. It worked for some bees but not others:

For four years I supplied my hives with glass tubes and not once did the Cotton-weavers or the Leaf-cutters condescend to take up their quarters in the crystal palaces. They always preferred the hovel provided by the reed. Shall I persuade them one day? I do not abandon all hope.

There is much much more of his delightful writing about the Wool Carder Bee here, part of the excellent website about Fabre complete with electronic texts: http://www.efabre.net/

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There are many different species of Anthidium and they have beautiful distinctively different patterns. I have spent quite a long time looking at the patterns and feel I really need to paint them all.

I was asked how I worked on these paintings, so this is my set up for the Anthidium. I will record a close up step by step if I can remember. I often intend to, for my own records, but normally get so engrossed that I just work from start to finish without stopping.

I have a little magnifying “third hand” which helps hold the bee in position and I used the back of an old picture frame as a small sloping board. After the initial sketches to determine the position, (in this case I really wanted to show off the beautiful markings on the abdomen) I draw the image lightly on the paper and then with the bee next to me, a good light and a lot of patience, I work on the painting in stages. I have 2 good W&N series 7 sable brushes sizes 0 and 00 and some cheaper synthetic ones for the initial washes. This painting took 5 hours once I had the image drawn on the paper. There are more details and more colours than show in the low resolution scan which tends to flatten the colours rather.. but it does give an idea.

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Bee No 12: The Wool Carder Bee, Anthidium sp.

Eucera:The curiously goat-like, Long Horned Bee

These bees are very very sweet. They are small and hairy, the males proudly sporting these exceptionally long and beautiful antennae. Their name, as you might expect,  comes from the Greek prefix “eu”= well + “keras” =horn, together meaning "well-horned". These are more ground nesting bees and it is only the males that have these exuberant antennae.

 

photo from Discover Life here

If you are wondering what bees use their antennae for, it’s mainly for the sense of smell. Their antennae have thousands of sensory cells, some used for touch, some for smell and others for taste.  Some bees it seems use them to detect air speed and  orientation during flight as well. Here is a wonderful electron microscope image of an Halicitd bee antenna.

 from the students of  Duke University here.

If you can see a bee clearly enough when it is foraging on a flower you will see it using its antennae, prodding about in the flower head. Also, erect antennae are a sign of alertness. A resting bee will have drooping antennae. (see Anna’s post here.)

The facts:

CLASS: Insecta
ORDER: Hymenoptera, Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies.
SUPERFAMILY: Apoidea. Bees and some wasps.
FAMILY: Apidae. Bees.
TRIBE:  Eucerini (Long-horned bees)

There are many different species of Long Horned Bees. Common in the USA are the Melissodes bimaculata which are lovely dark bees with 2 spots on their tail.

image from Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture

They specialise in the plant family Asteraceae, which includes asters, daisies and sunflowers. I will be painting one of these later.

Also commonly seen is the important little stripy squash bee  Peponapis pruinosa.

Photo of two Peponapis bees right in the middle of the squash flower by Gacko from Bug Guide.

These native USA bees are pollinators of the Cucurbita crops, pumpkins, gourds, and squashes, and growing  in  importance as the worry about the decline of the honey bee has made all agriculturalists, small and large, look again at the native bees and their invaluable contribution to food production.
After a hard morning chasing females, the male likes to rest in squash flowers in the afternoon and overnight. Like the Blue Banded Bee from the last post Eucera males in general like to form large batchelor get-togethers at night and the location may host bees from other species too. They often like flowers that close at night and you can sometimes gently touch a closed squash flower in the early morning and be rewarded with a little buzz. I emphasise gently,… dont squash the squash bees!

 

This bee I have drawn is  Eucera longicornis which is found in Europe although said to be declining in the UK along with the wildflowers that it was associated with.  Again the question is, what declines first, the plant or the pollinator? Remove one and we remove the other.

The bee is closely associated with the Fabaceae family such as Bird’s Foot Trefoil, Lotus corniculatus; the vetches, Vicia cracca, V. sepium; wild peas,  Lathyrus tuberosus, L. sylvestris; alfalfa, Medicago sativa; and the clovers,  Trifolium repens, T. pratense. Have a strip of nice bean flowers to encourage these handsome bees and then you can spend a therapeutic and happy hour watching them come and go. I feel that “bee watching” time should be part of everyone’s daily routine.

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Bee No 11: The Long Horned Bee, Eucera longicornis

Watercolour on Arches HP 3.5 inches.

Bee No 10: Australian Blue Banded Bee: Amegilla cingulata

For this project I am putting together a set of bees which hopefully will show their diversity and beauty, so variety in colour and shape and pattern is important. There are many different species from all around the world and as you would expect Australia has some unusual native bees.

This is the very beautiful Blue Banded Bee which has pale iridescent blue instead of yellow stripes and digs burrows in soft sandstone or clay for their nests.This is another solitary bee from the same family as the Hairy Footed Flower Bee from the last post.

The facts:

CLASS: Insecta
ORDER: Hymenoptera, Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies.
SUPERFAMILY: Apoidea. Bees and some wasps.
FAMILY: Apidae. Bees.
TRIBE: Anthophorini
GENUS:Amegilla
SPECIES: Amegilla cingulata

This website, www.aussiebee.com is a mine of information and is one of many which does its very best to encourage the public to understand and cherish their native bees, underlining their importance in pollination. This is another bee which performs “Buzz Pollination” (see my buzz pollination post here) and is now being seriously considered as a pollinator for commercial crops of tomatoes, eggplants and kiwifruit, as well as native plants such as Hibbertia, Senna and Solanum.

Up until now, tomato growers in Australia have had to use electronic fertilization methods and steps were being taken to import some European Bumble bees to help with the task. However the Blue Banded Bee has proved to be very capable and a breeding programme is now being developed.

Do watch this delightful short film from Aussiebee and see the males jostling for position on top of the twig, with a lot of cross leg waving. They will gather together here to rest..if they can agree..

Where and how bees rest at night is a fascinating subject and for another post, but these bees will gather together clinging onto twigs with their jaws.

Here is a photo by Anna Tambour of a " sleeping" blue banded bee from her post "The Sleeping Bees" which is lovely, as is her blog, Medlar Comfits here. I particularly like this as it shows her finger nail and gives you an idea of the size of these beautiful bees.

She also includes this quote from another site. Yallaroo Wildlife
"Unfortunately many gardeners have been conditioned to reach for poisons as soon as they see something with six legs and wings." Which is probably worth putting at the bottom of every post about bees

This bee had to show off its beautiful stripes. Also, its wings are much more transparent and lighter in colour than some others.

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Bee No 10: The Australian Blue Banded Bee, Amegilla cingulata

Watercolour on Arches HP, size 3.5 inches

On Thanksgiving Day

…. I am thankful for bees…. and my favourite Gary Larson bee cartoon :

The Hairy Footed Flower Bee.. yes really..

If ever a bee belonged in the world of the fairies this is it. The amazing Hairy Footed Flower Bee. I have painted the male, with its plumed feathery feet, its Roman nose and its equally endearing Latin name, Anthophora plumipes. I had not really given much thought to bees’ feet before I started this project but they are wonderful things.

See the plumes on the second leg..

photo by Jeffdelonge for Wikipedia here

Anthophora is another large bee genus with over 450 species worldwide. They vary enormously. Some are known as digger or mason bees and make wonderful elaborate homes with mud. This particular species is an early April bee and particularly long tongued, so able to make the most of tubular flowers such as the spring-flowering Lungwort, Pulmonaria, Comfrey, Symphytum, Cowslips, and the dead nettle family Lamium.

Adrian Knowles, Hymenoptera Recorder for the Suffolk Nature Society has this to say:

“At about 13mm long they are a little smaller than most bumblebees and they fly with very quick wings in a swift and darting flight, frequently hovering in front of flowers and so have a rather different “jizz” to their larger relatives. They are perhaps more reminiscent of rotund hairy hoverflies in their behaviour. They nest in tunnels excavated in steep, dry soil banks and .occasionally within the crumbling mortar of old masonry, as do several other solitary bees. Amazingly, they emerge from their pupae in late summer but remain in their sealed nest cells until the following spring – about 6 months spent as an adult just standing still! The females are all black, with yellow/orange hairs on her hind legs (you may need to look carefully to avoid confusion with bees bearing yellow pollen on their hind legs). The males are strikingly different, with dark orange/brown hairs towards the front of their bodies, giving way to black hairs anteriorly. “ ………not forgetting those hairy feet!

from Suffolk’ s Box Valley (UK) Nature Website here which will also take you to some interesting books on Suffolk’s Natural History.

The reason for the extravagant hairiness is, of course all to do courtship. If you are a female Hairy Footed Flower Bee (but without the hairy feet as the females don’t have them), I guess you will appreciate the tender ministrations of your beau as he wafts his hairy feet over your antennae, transferring his own brand of irresistible aftershave as he does. It’s not quite my idea of romance, but then I am not a bee …yet.

Gordon Ramel of the excellent Gordon’s Solitary Bee Pages has another theory ... As the females are notoriously skittish, it is possible that the male covers his mate’s eyes with those hairy feet to calm her down, (or to knock her out with that aftershave)
He tells us more about this game little bee

“The males are territorial and tend to guard a home range which contains either, the sorts of flowers the females like to visit, or a site suitable for nesting. The male patrols around his home range spending time at each patch of flowers and or nest site chasing off intruders. He is very serious about this and defends his chosen resources from all comers whether they are a competing male bee or not. To drive intruders away from his range he accelerates straight at them very quickly and rams them with his head, he can knock out insects much larger than himself this way”

You will also find links to some very good illustrations on this page, and Gordon’s Earthlife site is fun and informative and about much more than just bees.

Here is a photo of the lovely black female Hairy Footed Flower Bee with her orange coloured back legs..

from an Polish entomological site which has very good insect photos here

This particular species Anthophora plumipes, is most common in the Europe but according to the excellent Discover Life site, after introduction in Maryland they can now be found throughout the Washington DC region. Look out for them if you live in this area.

I spent far too long researching and reading about these bees. Sometimes it takes a long time to collect even a small amount of accurate information. I am going to put a list of useful bee sites on the sidebar soon. However deciding how to draw this bee was not too difficult. Of course I had to include the feet, that Roman nose and it does have lovely big eyes. I am also getting a little more familiar with bee anatomy so I made a couple of quick sketches just to get the pose right and then got on with the painting.

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Bee No 9: The Hairy Footed Flower Bee, Anthophora plumipes

The Tawny Mining Bee: Andrena fulva

Small volcanoes erupting in your lawn in spring are a sure sign that you have some mining bees hard at work, and how very cute they are too.. and numerous.  I must admit my heart sank when I read there are over 1,300 species in the world…which one to choose? 

I decided on a  European one and one from the USA. From Europe this is Andrena fulva  the winsome little Tawny Mining Bee, extremely pretty in two tone russet and ginger, looking like a little bottle brush. This is the female. the male is not quite so colourful. The bee world has some very big colourful girls, rather the opposite to the bird world!

Photo of the male Andrena fulva by J C Shou, from great photo site Biopix here

Mining Bees or Digger Bees are solitary  and “IBRA” the International Bee Research Association has a  good PDF about solitary bees here. This is what they say about Andrena fulva 

“The adults over winter in the ground and emerge in the spring. The females dig a tunnel into the ground, hence the need for easily workable soil, where the earth is bare or the grass is short. The tunnels are about 9mm in diameter and descend to a depth of 20 to 40 cm. At the end of the tunnel the bee will construct an oval cell and provision it with pollen and nectar. An egg is laid in
the cell, which is then sealed up. She then goes on to construct other branches to her tunnel and repeats the process laying about 5 eggs in her lifetime.
On cold days bees need to warm up before they can fly and so females are often seen in the morning sunbathing by tunnel entrances. “

Illustration from “How stuff works”  here.

And below, a lovely photo from Dick at www.citybirding.blogspot.com of his little tawny mining bee peeping out of her burrow.. he says;

“Once in their nest they stay quite still just below the opening until you get near and they shoot back down to the bottom of the nest, out of sight”

 

But, don’t worry about your pristine lawns.. just live with it for a few weeks and enjoy the bees. David Kendall is an Entomologist and has these kindly word for this pretty and useful bee,

“The Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva) is one of several species, commonly seen around gardens in early spring, which dig nest burrows in lawns and similar places. This bee is about the same size as a honeybee, but covered with fairly dense golden hairs.

The female bee makes a small volcano-like mound with the soil excavated from the nest. There may be many nests close together, giving the impression of communal life, but each female is actually working alone. Nesting activity lasts only a short time (perhaps 2-3 weeks), after which the small mounds of earth around each nest entrance soon disappear, with no permanent damage to the lawn. Take care not to confuse solitary bee nest mounds with the mounds of earth caused by the nesting activity of ant colonies. Solitary bee mounds have a single large entrance hole in the middle, and by watching for a short while on a warm sunny day, you will see the bees coming and going to collect pollen.

If left alone, these bees will often nest in the same area year after year, and provide an annual service by pollinating your early flowering fruit trees and shrubs (apples, pears, currants and gooseberries) and other garden plants - so helping to ensure good crops later in the year.

from his very nice readable site “Insects and other Arthropods” here

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Some preliminary sketches: I feel I should have included a little volcano and a ray of warming sunshine too.

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Bee No 8: The Female Tawny Mining Bee, Andrena fulva

 

 

Watercolour on Arches HP w/col paper: image 3.5 “

Bee No7: The Beautiful Violet Carpenter Bee. Xylocopa violacea

This is the companion to Bee 6: the Southern Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa micans. The Violet Carpenter Bee is one of the biggest bees in Europe and has beautiful blue/violet coloured wings and a big shiny black body. It just had to be included in the set.

The facts:

CLASS: Insecta
ORDER: Hymenoptera, Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies.
SUPERFAMILY: Apoidea. Bees and some wasps.
FAMILY: Apidae. Bees.
GENUS: Xylocopa. Large Carpenter Bees
SPECIES: Xylocopa violacea

This bee is common to the Mediterranean and Central Europe and now has been spotted occasionally overwintering in the UK. It has the same bad wood chewing habits as the other Carpenter Bees. There is another species of furry tan Carpenter Bee the Xylocopa varipucta which is on my list to paint and has been described as like a small flying teddy bear and I may get round to it later. .. so many bees so little time!

Bad news for Bees of Baldwin Park

Yesterday, the tidiness police came round to Lake Baldwin and decreed the chopping down of untidy weeds. We are allowed an environmentally protected zone as long as it is neat. A mowing man arrived and the whole of the lovely messy tangle of flowers, grasses and reeds has been razed to stalks and stubble.

We had this….

Now this, even this last clump of horsemint in the foreground was gone by lunchtime.

Gone are the Spotted Horsements, the Indian Blanket, the wild Blue and Golden Asters, the Yellow Tickseed, the grassy Bottle Brush, the Morning Glories, the Dog Fennel, the brilliant Scarlet Tassel Flower, the delicate purple headed Hairawn Muhly, the silvery Bushy Bluestem, the small Rattle Box shrubs, the Lopsided Indiangrass whose beautiful feathery tops glistened in the morning sun, the odd black dots of the Rayless Flowers, and various pretty Red Pea flowers, and that is to name just the few that I can identify … but we are tidy now.

Gone too are the singing frogs, the chirruping crickets, the sand wasps, the paper wasps, the clicking dragonflies, the beetles, the snakes, the lizards and a million bugs and flies and worst of all, my bees.
All is silent, still and a bit sad. Of course it will all be back in due course but it seems a shame.

But back to the Carpenter Bee and a simple sketch to just get the proportions right .

and a colour sketch

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Bee No 7: The Violet Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa violacea