Author Gary Taylor ◦
Finally! Perhaps… 😄
Ok, so the wind has been blowing it’s guts out for the last four days solid making it really hard to get any decent pics, and I’ve seen a bunch of gorgeous bees but this little one caught my attention straight up… Now I gotta point out here, another of my “nemesis” bees (like the little Callohesma I posted), that I’ve seen on occasions but continues to elude me photography wise, is Hyleoides, the wasp mimic bee… and they’re not even particularly rare… 😄
But the first thing I noticed was the white stripe under the abdomen (1st pic). Paralastor wasps (which would be my wasp guess) don’t have that stripe, but Hyleoides zonalis does… 2nd pic, a bit blurry but you can make out the “T” like face marking, which is unlike any wasp I know of but very much like that on H. zonalis… It has the same “collar” and spots on it’s back as zonalis… But H. zonalis is bright yellow, not orangey-red…
So I either have a colour variation of Hyleoides zonalis, or I have the wasp that zonalis mimics but due to Hymenoptera copyright laws had to choose a different colour… 😅
Edited, one more thing… I was standing by the flowers when it first landed so it wasn’t really bothered by me at the start, but when it moved to different spot, and I tried to follow, it fell from the flowers and disappeared into the shadows like a typical Hylaeine, rather than fly up like a wasp does… 🙂
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