Author Gary Taylor ◦
Here’s another one I mentioned seeing in the “new” bee season, Lasioglossum (Chilalictus), but the Hakea lissocarpha flowers are thick and she is small so I’m going to use some old pics of her for a better explanation… 😃
Righto, first up, a bit of background info. Although these gorgeous little bees are ground nesting “solitary” bees (loving natural mulch piles), they will often share their patch with a bunch of others, making sizable communities, and (usually around the 2nd week of October) the young emerge in their many, many hundreds of thousands forming huge migrating “swarms”… (see foot note but be warned it’s sad, odd but sad…)
Ok, so, to the pics… They’re kinda in reverse order, 3rd was actually first… 14th of October 2019, glorious morning, the sort of morning you don’t even bother putting clothes on, just the kettle, and honey on brown bread toast… (those that know the difference will know what I mean… 😉), and head out into the garden for an early dose of vitamin D… Which I did, and found myself in one of the thickest migrations I’ve ever seen at my place, it was like they’d all agreed to meet up in my backyard before heading off… 😄 Then, as I watched in awe, suddenly I was set upon by a mob of ravenous wild bees after my toast!.. I tried to gently shoo them off with the mug of coffee in my other hand without spilling it but knew it was hopeless when one bee groaned with pleasure and said “Oh, yeah… that’s it… warm coffee, manuka honey, brown bread, mate you’re a legend…” and called all his friends over… 😂 And lookin’ at the pics it sounds peaceful but nah these were taken well after the attack, at the time it was more like “And a man in the back said everyone attack and it turned into a ballroom blitz, ball room blitz…” 😆 I had bees coming from all sides… I had to put my coffee down, grab my toast with my coffee hand ‘cos after all the swishing and shooing I now had bees queueing up on the honey dribbling down my toast hand, and scoff it as quick as I could ‘cos I was coppin’ a lickin’… 😅 Anyway, toast finished, blitz over, I still had a bunch of bees on my finger and they happily stayed there while I went back inside and got my camera… 😆
So, 3rd pic, here’s me still copping a lickin’… 😃 Such an odd sensation, you can feel their raspy little tongues… And before anyone starts, yes I know you should never give native bees honey… I didn’t give, I was brutally attacked and robbed… 😆 2nd pic, a bit of friendly push and shove over a find… But to me the 1st pic is the capture that shows their true personality, cruisy, friendly, just mates having a yarn… Bee on the right was telling an awesome story, had me and the other two bees on the edge of our seats… 😆 “… so there I was, stuck in the web with this huge spider coming towards me, when suddenly…” Check out the bee to the left, holding a little ball of honey in her middle hand like a bag of popcorn, waiting to hear what happened next… 😄
Footnote
I said “migrating swarms” of hundreds of thousands, that’s not an exaggeration… and here it gets sad, odd but sad… For 8 years I worked at a coastal 4.5 star resort, every year the Lasioglossum would “swarm” and land in the huge heated outdoor pool… Why? Native bees don’t need water… Did they see the mass of blue and despite the stench of chlorine think it was flowers? Doubt it… And how many tiny bees does it take to fill a bucket? Dunno but every day for nearly two weeks I’d be emptying a bucket of dead bees from the skimmer boxes several times a day…🙁 And, it’s odd ‘cos we were only 50 metres from the beach, the Indian Ocean, where did they think they were going? Next land mass is Africa…
Photographs Lasioglossum chilalictus, Midwest WA © Gary Taylor
Check out more blogs and contribution by Gary Taylor.