Squash bees

Here are some more pictures of bees to help us think of spring! Today I'm sharing a few shots of 'squash bees' Peponapis sp. These bees have a close relationship with the flowers of squash plants (genus Cucurbita). They spend most of their time in and around squash flowers, flying before dawn and until noon - when flowers are open - and spending the day nestled inside the closed flower. The female builds her nest in the ground nearby, and spends her time digging and provisioning the nest with pollen from the squash flower. Males hang out in the flower waiting for females to mate with.

A female bee covered in pollen sticks her tongue out.

A male bee (note the white dot on the nose). Many species of male bees can be distinguished by similar yellow or white face markings.

Male bees hanging around.

It's not what it looks like: Wanna bees (and wasps)

Mimicry is a technique used by many insects. There are multiple kinds of mimicry. One kind is Müllerian is where species look like each other, and they all have something unsavory about them (poisonous, stings, bites). For example, many bees and wasps have aposematic (black/yellow warning) coloring to warn predators that they can sting. Then there is Batesian, where palatable or harmless species evolve to look like the more threatening model. The following examples are of the latter. Even when I've been out collecting I've been fooled by some excellent mimics, namely flies, and netted them thinking they were bees. In that instance, resembling a bee or wasp didn't help them.

Looks like a bumble bee right? When I saw it flying around, I thought so. Some excellent mimics even imitate behavior and flight. And this one was excellent, weaving around like a bee searching for flowers. But when it landed I saw it was a robber fly, family Asilidae. It hunts other insects so it's mimicry may serve two purposes, fooling predators and prey - by looking like a vegetarian bee! 

One way to tell flies apart from bees and wasps is by the number of wings. Flies have two, bees and wasps have four (though they are often overlapping or held together).

Here's another fly that is often mistaken for a honey bee. It's a syrphid fly, or hover or flower fly. Expert fliers, they often look like bees. Small striped ones drink sweat from our skin and we incorrectly called them sweat bees as children. But there are small green bees that are also known as sweat bees, for the same habit, and they do sting.

 

Another syrphid, this one looking like a yellow jacket wasp. I thought it was one, and netted it.

Soldier fly, I personally think it looks like a shiny black wasp known as a cricket catcher.

I've shared photos of this one before - the hummingbird clear wing moth. It has coloration modeled after a bumblebee.

Beautiful Cuckoos

Cuckoo wasps or jewel wasps, belong to the family Chrysididae. They are kleptoparasitic, meaning like the bird of the same name, they lay their eggs in the nest of other bees and wasps, depending on the work of others to raise their offspring. My graduate adviser, Lynn Kimsey, did some taxonomic work on the group, and had a general fondness for "green shiny things". I share that fondness and I'm always excited to get a picture of these wasps. 

Some honey bees near Putah Creek on a California spring day

I don't want to get too technical today. I'd just like to show you some spring pictures of honey bees on a lovely patch of purple vetch in a California field. 

And here is a sample of the nearby Putah Creek on the same day. Incidentally this creek is also known as "Green River" and is the subject of the CCR song.

Insect Love

When delving into the world of insects, you can find some very interesting mating behavior. One example (I happily do not have a picture of) is bedbugs. They engage in "traumatic insemination". When the male finds a female, he uses a sword-like organ to stab her, (anywhere in the abdomen will do!) and releases sperm into the body cavity. You can tell how many times a female has mated by the scars on her body. Yikes. 

The damselflies pictured above are pretty tame in comparison. The male (blue) grabs the female's (gray) neck with graspers on the end of his abdomen. Then she reaches her abdomen forward to collect sperm from a spot on his abdominal, resulting in this heart shaped acrobatic embrace. When they're done the male maintains his grasp and hangs on to guard the female from other males while she lays eggs.

A fluffy new drone

And then there are honey bees. The male honey bee is called a drone. In a hive full of female workers and queen, drones are produced in larger numbers at certain times of year. Also produced at this time are virgin queens. They go out on a mating flight to mate with many males from other colonies to collect enough sperm for a lifetime of egg laying in the hive. The drones fly out to meet the queens, and high in the air we learn a new term- "explosive ejaculation". When a drone mounts a queen, his penis everts, he becomes paralyzed, and the force of ejaculation blows the end of his abdomen off! That's the end if the story for the drone. If they miss out on mating, they are tossed out of the hive by their worker sisters in the fall, since they cannot feed themselves and would be a strain on the colony for the winter. Their only purpose in life is to mate.

I was rather excited to find these hanging flies engaged with a third (dead) party, and realized what was happening. A male has found prey and brought it to a female. This is known as a "nuptial gift". She eats it while they mate. The gift provides nutrition for the female and a larger gift gives the male sufficient time to mate while the female is busy eating.

Here are some other insects mating. Happy Valentines day!

Glowing scorpions

When I was in grad school I had the pleasure of learning how to go "black lighting" for scorpions. Many people do not realize this, but scorpions have proteins in their exoskeletons that react to ultra-violet light, and cause them to "fluoresce" or glow under a black light lamp. This is very useful for scorpion hunting, because scorpions - which are typically well camouflaged - are easy to find at night as long as you have a black light.

In this instance, we were exploring Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California.

A scorpion, obvious in the undergrowth.

Scorpion under regular flashlight...

And under a black light.

And here is a video of one of my mentors catching the scorpion. He didn't mind, and perhaps even enjoyed grabbing stinging arthropods and mentions this one stung him when he captured it.