The most common bee on the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant was an insect that I initially didn’t think was a bee at all. I thought it was a wasp.
This is a ‘Cellophane Bee’ – a species inThe genus Hylaeus.
As you can see in the photo below, these Hylaeus bees are quite small. Probably 3 or 4 mm long.
One of the reasons I thought these bees were wasps was that they looked like wasps. They had a relatively elongate, body shape, and a black-and-cream facial pattern which made me think ‘wasp’.
The other reason I thought they were wasps was that they did not have any of the specialized pollen-carrying hairs that most other bees have.
The reason they don’t have those external structures is interesting. From my reading, the females of these solitary bees carry pollen back to the nest cells in their crops, not externally, on special pollen-carrying hair structures.
That’s why they were spending such a large amount of time eating pollen – they were provisioning their nest cells with the pollen.
When they return to their nest cells, the females will regurgitate the pollen and make ‘bee bread’ with it. Then they’ll lay an egg on the ball of bee bread, seal off the cell, and start on another cell.
They are called ‘Cellophane Bees’ because they line the larval cells with a material they secrete that is a stiff film, like cellophane.
