Sept 27th – Identification updates

Hello everyone!

I have started to do the blog updates on a semi-weekly basis, in part because I am at the stage of identification where I am mostly identifying Ceratina for days on end and you might get tired of hearing about Ceratina once again. I was also on vacation for the last week, so that has not helped with new content creation.

A male bumble bee from my vacation says hello.

Either way, since our last blog update, we are now up to 22,000 of the bees identified to at least genus, with 12,500 of those identified to species.


Cool bees:

We did get our first male Hoplitis spoliata collected by Heath White, which is nice enough to have rather distinct antennae.

The bee looks normal and generic enough from the side. The two submarginal cells puts this in the family Megachilidae. This is not the genus Megachile because it has an arolia between the tarsi (though not visible in this photo).

Looking at the antennae directly, we can see the distinctly expanded segments. It is unusual for bees to have segments so disproportionally shaped in comparison to the rest of the antenna, with these wide segments almost double the width of the end segments.

 

All for now,

MaLisa

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