Author Gary Taylor ◦
Had to laugh at a Facebook post earlier about spending a fortune on native plants for native bees and only seeing ’em on a $2 daisy… 😆
I remember posting a pic of a lonely little Lassioglossum on another page years ago, calling it the $250 dollar bee… Asked why, I said that’s what I’d spent on native flowering plants over the last month to attract native bees, but so far it was native bee, singular… 😄
Anyway, I persisted, built a small bee hotel, which became so popular with the natives I had to keep adding on more apartments and housing options (I now call it BeeTown).
So far I’ve had about 18 different species of native bees call my Beetown home, including one (so far un-Id’ed) Hylaeus that prefers to chew out it’s own nest in soft wood and then makes a perfectly fitting, camouflaged, hinged door for the entrance, so cool… plus Hylaeus nubilosus, whoopy doo you say, common as muck, yeah sure, over east. But they’re an eastern states bee, only relatively recently been recorded here in WA, but much further south around outlying areas of Perth. Might just bee nubilosus, but it’s the first recorded sighting of her this far north of Perth, boring as batshit to some, but from a science point of view, Aus Living Atlas “where are they found” sort of thing it’s kinda cool… And Megachile (Thaumatosoma) doublaii, first described in 1865, never seen since, no known pics of it, nested last year in BeeTown and I got pics of the whole process… Now that is cool…
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not blowin’ my own horn here, I’m just a regular nature loving bloke, this just happened, it could happen to anyone… what I’m trying to say is, stick with it… The joy of seeing a new species of native bee emerge from a place that you have provided for it, feeding on the flowers you’ve chosen that you hope she’ll like and she does and chooses to raise her offspring in the little town she grew up in is awesome… 😃
So here’s a new little Megachile I watched emerge from a nest in my BeeTown a few days ago enjoying the Hardenbergia I planted for her a couple years ago 🙂
Images © Gary Taylor