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Blue Banded Bees
8/2/2014
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A female native Blue Banded Bee, Amegilla (Zonamegilla) cingulata (pictured). Yesterday I visited a friend who lives in a mud brick house and has about 50 of these bees nesting in one of her walls. They are a solitary bee species, the females of which nest individually (although often near each other, in aggregations). A single female excavates a burrow in the ground (or a mud brick, or the side of a dry riverbank or gully), where she lays just five or so eggs (in individually partitioned cells). She forages on lots of flowers, makes small parcels of pollen and nectar to provision each of her eggs, and then seals up the nest. Having done what female solitary bees do, she then usually dies. Over time, the eggs develop into larva, and then pupa. Finally, fully developed bees emerge from the nest, and go forth and repeat the process (males just live lives of mating, eating, and hanging out at night in posses, on the undersides of shrubs). These bees are ‘buzz pollinators’, and are great pollinators of tomatoes
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