Author Gary Taylor ◦
I have previously seen the Megachile canifrons (a resin bee) popping the caps off Eucalyptus platypus flowers like champagne corks to get to the fresh new pollen and nectar within, but it was so fast I hadn’t managed to get a pic…. And so far every time I’ve watched it she’s been partially obscured by the other buds, so I haven’t actually seen how she does it… I’d kinda envisioned her latching on to the base of the cap with her huge jaws and throwing it off like some herculean caber tossing champion but yeah, nah, dunno… the last one I saw, the cap came off like a rocket, hit another crown of new buds 20 cm away hard enough to make a “clack” noise and then fell with a “click, clack, click…” as it seemed to hit every twig and branch on the way down… (the relevance of that will be clear in a minute 😄).
So, a different Megachile, I reckon this one is most likely perhaps Eutricharaea chrysopyga (from the Latin chryso meaning golden and pyga being rump… as in 2nd pic).
1st pic, (yeah it’s not great focus, I was 4 steps up a stepladder leaning out with a clumsy Euro bee that fell out of it’s flower stuck in my chest hair buzzing angrily 😆) may at first glance look like she’s just cut a few stamens to lick the nectar deeper in, but I reckon she’s trying to pull that cap off… She’s got both front arms AND both middle arms/legs (they work as both), hooked on to the rim of the cap, pulling it back… Her jaws aren’t jammed in there for nectar (tho’ it may be a bonus), they’re jammed in to give her something to push/pull against… Righto, I doubt there’s anyone reading this that hasn’t pulled the cap off a Eucalypt flower, you know, just to help, it looked like it was stuck… 😅 so you’d have seen the way it springs out… And that’s the key. The capped flower is already under the tension of stamens wanting to spring out… By cutting the stamens on the outside of the long slightly cone shaped cap she’s increasing the tension on the inside of the cap to slip off (notice she’s also cut some of the tension wires on the opposite side so when it launches it goes straight, it’s just one of the rules, if you’re going to launch a rocket you have to do it safely… 😄) And that’s why her back legs are swingin’ free, when that spring loaded cone (with the help on an almighty shove) comes shooting off that’s a rocket she doesn’t want to be riding, let alone backwards… getting slammed into a crown of hard new buds then “Oooff, Owww, Aargh…” as she hits every branch and stick on the way down… 😅
Anyway, I don’t know if it was the camera up in her face (probably) but she turned around and flew off after this pic so until I get some photo’s to prove it, it’s just a theory… maybe she was just stealing nectar and was only gripping the cap to push her face in after all… and then maybe that’s how they discovered they could push the caps off in the first place… 😃
The last 3 pics are just random shots of her feeding because I mentioned in a comment that two quick ways to tell a resin bee from a leafcutter are firstly the shape of the abdomen, resin bee bums are rounded like Roman arches, leafcutters are more pointy at the end like Gothic arches. The second is that resin bees tend to feed and collect pollen on a flower with their wings folded whereas leafcutters usually feed and collect with wings splayed and their bum up, often making a a real show of it… Which this one isn’t, but you gotta take into account her bright colour and all ’round shiny new look, I’d reckon she’s only recently emerged into the world (having not eaten for up to 9 months) and for now just wants some food in her guts 🙂
Geraldton, Midwest WA
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