Author Gary Taylor ◦
Clocked up about 1000 K’s in the last 2-3 weeks in the hunt for new bees in Midwest WA. It’s either been stinkin’ hot (40+) and blowing it’s guts out (hopeless for macro) or stinkin’ hot and so humid the sweat pouring off your forehead turns your glasses into a water feature so you look down to your shirt for a dry patch to clean ’em but there isn’t one… then you stupidly tilt the camera up to check if the lens is clean… and it was, until you stupidly tilted it up to a sudden cascade of sweat running off your hat… 😅 And got nothin’… well, nothing new (apart from kidney stones maybe) 😆
I was sulking, I needed the buzz of a New Bee fix… So I went out the back to my BeeTown (can’t sulk there, too much wonderful nature going on 🙂) and within seconds spotted this gorgeous little cutie… Woohoo! Yet another new species of Megachile to nest in BeeTown (Haha, dickhead, 1000 K’s of dry dusty dirt roads in killer heat while a new bee has been setting up under the cool shade of the massive ficus in your own backyard… 😂).
Anyway, she’s tiny compared to most Megachile and a great example for the question “What sized holes should I use for my bee hotel?”. This girl is using is a 3mm diameter hole about 110mm deep (the smaller Hylaeines like Gnathoprosopis will use them too 🙂), the largest sized hole I’ve ever seen used by a bee (*see footnote) was 10mm, but 8mm seems to be preferable for the larger Megachile we have here (such as aurifrons and erythropyga), and 4.5 and 6mm seems to bee comfortable for most others including the larger Hylaeines…
But back to the new bee, one thing that strikes me with this new girl (and may help with ID) is her gorgeous two toned eyes… I thought it was a light/shadow thing at the start but no, there is a definite line down the length of the eye with the front part black and back part that typical lighter colour with spots. Another is her somewhat unique facial features as seen from the angle in the third pic as she’s backing in with a load of pollen… Yeah, nah, dunno what’s going on there… need a better pic… 😅
Easy to say but this little sweetheart is seriously fast and there’s no muckin’ about… She comes in to land like a jet on an aircraft carrier and it’s only a matter of seconds before she’s pushed her last load of pollen up into a pile (you can see the pollen on her face in the 4th pic) and is backing out to spin around and back in to kick off the next load before launching out like the same jet for another… 😄 Maybee tomorrow… 🙂
*Footnote… For those of us that have used bamboo, despite what you’ve been told, there is nothing wrong with having a few “over-sized” holes in the mix… Firstly, if you’ve ever gone and got what you thought was a heap of bamboo lengths and spent hours carefully cutting it into individual tubes sealed on one end thinking you’d have enough perfect sized nests to fill a bucket, you’ll know disappointment… 😅 By all means use them as “fillers”… ‘Cos secondly, there’s a bunch of wasps that prefer a larger entrance to fit their spiders in but they’ll use a “bee sized” nest if that’s all there is… it can ease the pressure on the property market… Thirdly, you can always sleeve them with a smaller tube down the track… Fourthly, studies have shown that bees find it easier and quicker to locate their nests when they have “landmarks” nearby… A bit like in the old days before mobile phones and GPS when you’d be lost driving around a new suburb looking for a house you’ve only ever been to once or twice and it’s only when you go past the servo and little supermarket that you know where you are… Some people call the over-sized tubes a spider attracting (only ’til the wasp spots you buddy… 😆) waste of time. I call ’em highly important strategical navigational facilities capable of bringing interspecial harmony… 😃And lastly, don’t ever let anyone put you down for trying, none of us are born knowing it all, what’s important is you’re trying…
