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Category: bees (Page 3 of 29)

End of Year Photo Matching Quiz

December 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

In the past I’ve posted an end of the year list of my favorite photographs. This year let’s mix it up with a matching quiz. Can you match the adult insect with its immature stage or something associated with it? If you want to, leave your results in the comments. Bonus points for correct identifications. Note: Not all letters have been used. All the photos are from 2020.

Adult Insects:

A. She’s a big-eyed beauty on a stick.

B. This mimic may fool you because it resembles another popular insect.

C. Often seen visiting flowers.

D. Flies away to the mountains in the summer.

K. The hardest of all, although the answer is here in the blog.

Now match the adults with their life stages or products.

F.  Has a very specific host plant.

G. Sitting on a tree trunk.

H. Hungry, hungry.

I. What life stage is this?

L. Not an insect, but produced by insects.

Have fun!

(The answers are now posted.)

Bug of the Week: Sleeper or Long-horned Bees

July 29, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The male bees have been photogenic this month. After the male carpenter bee two weeks ago, I found something unusual on a milkweed early one morning.

Actually, it isn’t really unusual, you just have to get up early in the morning to see it. This is a cluster of male long-horned bees “sleeping” on a plant overnight.

If you look at bit closer, you can see the long antennae that give them the common name long-horned bee.

Isn’t it adorable?

These particular bees likely belong to the Genus Melissodes.

If the male bees form a cluster to sleep on a plant overnight, where are the females?

Each female long-horned bee builds a tunnel nest in the soil, so that’s where she stays at night. During the day she gathers nectar and pollen from flowers to provision her nest and then lays eggs on the food.

What do the male bees do during the day?

You can spot the male bees hovering around plants with flowers defending them from other bees and looking for females to mate with.

Have you ever been lucky enough to spot a cluster of sleeping bees?

#WorldBeeDay Hands- On STEAM Activities

May 21, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Melissodes trinodus bee

May 20 is World Bee Day, but we can celebrate bees any day with hands-on STEAM activities.

1. Visit the World Bee Day website for detailed information about the importance of bees (and other pollinators). Look for why the organizers chose May 20 for the date. The right sidebar contains many links to other informative websites, including the beautifully designed and engaging Buzzing with Life.

2. Tohono Chul Gardens has put together an amazing collection of lessons about bees and other pollinators. Created to cover a week’s worth of activities, it includes instructions for gardening and art. If nothing else, download the bee homes activity (PDF).

3. To get a glimpse of the diversity of bees (and some other insects), check out the photographs at the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr page. Seriously. Click on the photographs to learn the scientific names of the bees and more about them. For example, our little long-horned bee in the photograph above is a Melissodes trinodus.

4. Make a honey bee model (previous Growing with Science post).

5. See our collection of honey bee science activities as well as all our posts in the bee category.

6. Visit our growing list of children’s books about bees at Science Books for Kids.

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