Author Gary Taylor ◦
A quick one before work… and before I get into this weeks new bees… meanwhile, back at the ranch, with several species of Megachile nesting and the ever growing rubricata population still increasing, my BeeTown is a hive of activity…
But I’ll start with these girls, Meroglossa rubricata and a bit of bubbling…
For anyone else who is not sure what bubbling is… it’s to evaporate the water content from the nectar in order to concentrate the sucrose (sugar content). And it’s not just so they can fit more in… Firstly, all bees actually require a certain percentage of sugar concentration to power their wings for flight (you can’t fly a jet on lawnmower fuel) but also, secondly, bees in the Hylaeinae and Euryglossinae families don’t collect pollen externally to feed their young, they ingest it and mix it with concentrated nectar (as in pic below). So it needs to be thick enough to hold together and not just soak into timber floorboards so to speak… 🙂
Photographs / Video © Gary Taylor
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