sweat bee – Brennah's Backyard

Last Aster Standing

Back in 2021 we started some native wildflowers from seeds. Since they are perennials they didn’t really fill out until the next year, though a few plants produced a scattering of flowers in their first year. One of of the species we planted was the aromatic aster. I chose it because it was supposed to be an especially late blooming and drought tolerant species (we’re mostly in a wetland, but had one dry area to plant) and by early November of last year it was the last aster still blooming. (To be fair, the most exuberantly blooming plant was in a favorable spot for soaking up late day warmth, and nicely mulched, which does help extend the growing season.) It was also one of the last few flowers blooming in general, so not surprisingly, it attracted the attention of all the remaining pollinators and concentrated them in a small patch of flowers. In particular, the asters were covered in bumble bees.

It was pretty easy to get some good pictures of the bumble bees since there were a whole bunch of them and they didn’t seem at all concerned about having a camera right next to them.

So many bees concentrated together in this patch sometimes led to bees foraging in close quarters…

These two got a little too close, and are trying to fend each other off here.

This little halictus bee also wasn’t too comfortable with having a big bumble bee wandering up behind him.

Another halictus bee resting on a flower. She hung out on this flower for quite a while.

There were a couple of drone flies hanging out in the midst of all the bees. Drone flies are a type of hover fly, also known as flower flies (and both names are quite accurate).

After the encounter with the bumble bee this halictus bee decided to groom himself and have a little rest, giving me a particularly good opportunity to take his portrait.

There were a few of these tiny, colorful agapostemon bees darting around. They’re tricky to photograph because they’re fast, but I noticed they would pause and rest every once and a while, so I managed to get a couple nice pictures of them.

Wildlife Photography Requires Patience…

It occurred to me that in one of my last posts ‘Life in a Dead Tree’, I described the bees I found nesting in the tree, and included the best photo I’d managed to take of one of them, which wasn’t very good. I knew at the time that it wasn’t particularly good, but decided it was better than nothing. That didn’t stop me from trying to get a better one next time their nesting season came around. It took me over a month of attempting whenever the weather seemed good for bees to be active, but I finally managed to get the photos I was after. And some of my ‘failed’ attempts were actually kind of cool in their own right.

nest hole of an augochlora sweat bee with bee antennae poking out — At the time I took this picture, I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or disappointed that only the bee’s antennae were visible… I did not have a proper picture of these bees nesting yet, and the bee seemed to have no intention of coming out the rest of the way. It is kind of cute though, and now I can properly enjoy it knowing I eventually succeeded in photographing these bees.

nest hole of an augochlora sweat bee surrounded by wood dust — This is the nest of the bee I waited for for quite a while (in a not very comfortable position) to come out of her nest. All she ever did was poke her antennae out a bit. I spotted this nest thanks to all the ‘sawdust’ piled around the entrance from recent excavations. All you can really see of the bee in this photo is a tiny glint of green in the hole.

native bee excavating a nest in a log — This is not the species of bee I was after, but it was my first decent photo of a bee emerging from a nest in a log. It isn’t quite as sharp as my next set of pictures, but it does show the bee actively excavating her nest (you can see the chewed up wood in her mandibles) which I think is pretty cool.

Augochlora sweat bee at the entrance to her nest — My first clear shot of an augochlora bee exiting her nest!

Augochlora sweat bee on a mossy log — Another bee scoping out a log. I don’t know if she had a nest here, or if she was looking for a spot to build her nest, but she looked pretty next to the yellow-green moss. Her genus name, augochlora, actually translates to ‘gold-green’.

Life on a Dead Tree

There is a particular fallen tree in the woods that I visit frequently, because there is usually something interesting to see there. When it was still standing, I identified it as a wild cherry, and although I’ve seen others, this one was the largest.

wild black cherry tree (Prunus serotina) — The wild cherry tree when it was still standing

A while after the tree fell, I started to notice a lot of different mushrooms growing on it, and I started to make a habit of checking on it to see if there were any particularly photogenic mushrooms there while I was out taking pictures in the woods.

This spring while out in the woods taking pictures of the various wildflowers and trying to determine what kind of pollinators they were providing for, I noticed new interesting things happening with the downed cherry. At first I noticed the metallic green bees darting around the dark, scaly bark. Then I saw something green and shiny, but it wasn’t a bee…

A six-spotted tiger beetle (cicindela sexguttata)

Even though tiger beetles have a bit of a reputation for being hard to photograph, I found the little green sweat bees to be much more difficult, at least in the circumstances the fallen tree offered. They were attracted to the dead tree as a nesting site and I would see them darting around the wood, but almost anytime they landed, they would immediately disappear into the tiny holes in the wood that were the entrances to their nests.

I’m sure there are more creatures than just the ones I noticed making use of the dead tree as habitat, and I’ll continue to notice more as I keep on visiting the tree.

A toad that was sheltering under the bark of the tree

A seedling growing from a crack in the bark. I don’t know if this is a good place for this seedling to be growing, but I thought it was interesting.

A Sweat Bee on my Finger

I caught this tiny little sweat bee trying to find her way out of our hoophouse. She had obviously been foraging on something, probably thistle, judging by all the white pollen she had acquired around her back legs. Sweat bee is a common name given to a family of bees that like to lick sweat for the minerals it contains. This particular type of sweat bee is the smallest bee I see around here. As small as they are, female sweat bees can still sting a human, but they reserve this ability for when they are in immediate danger of being crushed to death. And yet, they are one of the more likely bees to be stung by simply because they are tiny and have a habit of landing on people, who may not notice they’re there. Fortunately, their venom is extremely mild (maybe just because there’s so little of it); for me, the effects last less than five minutes.

sweat bee with pollen — Sweat bee with pollen on my fingertip

After I had carried her out of the hoophouse, this little bee let me take some pictures of her before she flew off. She even seemed a bit curious about my camera, crawling too close to the lens to focus on, and landing briefly on the camera as she flew away.