Bees And Not-to-bes

A few further identification issues have cropped up as as improving weather has brought more species into play.

Honey Bee (dark version)

Noting the presence of nomad bees and bee flies quite frequently, I started to wonder when I would see a red mason bee or any of the host mining bees in the garden.

Last Friday I thought I might have managed it but appearance approved to be deceptive as, on closer look it proved to be the darker version of the western honey bee when I finally captured it a a bug box.

The giveaway here is the cylindrical shape of the abdomen, where as it would be more rounded on a mining or red mason bee.

Not so many complications occur with butterflies in the North, although the whites can be a bit confusing if you don't see them close up. It took me a few years to get the female orange tip right because it is so different from the male.

However I did initially misidentify the first green-veined white to turn up in the garden as it arrived so soon after I'd managed to photograph the first male orange tip and visited the same area of forget-me-nots.

Orange Tip

Green-veined White

In this case of course the ideal way of separating then is to get a look at the underwing as they are completely different.  But you forget these things sometimes.

I also spent a good deal of time taking photos of this rather large carder bee (possibly a queen) as I wasn't altogether sure that it wasn't a tree bumblebee and every time it settled, you couldn't get a clear view of the abdomen.  This was the eventual decisive shot:

Carder Bee

I got into even deeper water when I captured another nomad bee and realised it didn't look quite like the Gooden's nomad bee I was anticipating.

Mystery Nomad Bee

Well I was right.  Experts on facebook, having spotted a tinge of red at the top of the abdomen which totally eluded me, confirmed it's not Gooden's and there was one suggestion that it might be a species that I did have under suspicion on the basis of the stripe pattern - the broad-banded nomad bee.  

However the broad banded nomad bee is rare and there have been no confirmed sightings in the North of England. So it has to go down as a mystery - one of several tricoloured nomad bees that are very similar and also very variable in appearance.

Anyway two days later I did finally manage to catch up with at least the red mason bee, if in a somewhat unusual fashion.

I was taking a look at the bug hotel on the summer house when I noticed that there was something struggling ing in a bucket of water directly beneath.  I fished it out and discovered that it was in fact two bees trapped in flagrante delicto, which I transferred onto a stray forget-me-not in a plant pot.  

Identification wasn't easy as a drenched bee looks completely different from a dry one.  They stayed like that for a while until, suspecting it was dead, I touched the male and it flew off.  The female eventually disappeared too.  I was convinced they were red mason bees and, sure enough, ones and twos started to appear on the bug hotel.

Double Red Mason Bees

Single Red Mason Bee (l)