While I was photographing the Honeybees on the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant flowers, I noticed a number of small (3-5mm, perhaps) bees on the flowers as well. One type of bee had an orange abdomen, and was collecting pollen directly from the stamens with a great deal of industry.
I’m far from positive on the ID of this bee, but think it is a species of Lasioglossum.
To get some idea of how small these bees are, below is a photo of a cluster of Bee Plant flowers, along with a European Honeybee.
And here’s a single flower in my (somewhat dirty) fingers, for scale.
Those filaments that project out around the flowers have little green dots of pollen on them. Those are the stamens, the male part of the flowers. Here’s a close-up of a couple of the stamens. They are coiled up, and have little green specks of pollen on them.
These little orange-abdomened bees were working at the stamens, collecting the pollen and pasting it to the hairy ‘pollen baskets’ on their legs.
Until I had a chance to examine the photos of these bees, I thought that they had green legs and abdomens. I didn’t realize that the green coloration was from the Bee Plant pollen that they had collected. That’s how much pollen each bee was carrying.
The bees will take the pollen back to a brood cells that they have made and pack it into the cell, then lay an egg on the pollen mass.
My suspicion is that these bees are not very good pollinators for this flower, since they are seldom going near the female portion of the flower. I wonder if this is why the flower coils its stamens – to make it more difficult for non-target pollen collectors to take all of the pollen at once.
