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Saihōji (Kokedera) Temple, Kyoto, Japan by Tomoyuki Hasegawa
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Snail photography by Zheng Yi Liu, 2020
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Internet Archive
Osmia avosetta: these solitary bees place their eggs in colorful nesting capsules that they build using flower petals, nectar, and mud
Osmia avosetta is a very rare species of mason bee that was just discovered about 16 years ago. These are solitary bees, meaning that they don't form colonies or live together in hives; each female builds her own nest instead, placing her eggs in a small batch of enclosed brood capsules and then burying the capsules in burrows and other cavities.
Each capsule contains a single egg, along with enough pollen and nectar to sustain the larva until it reaches adulthood.
Above: the photo at the top shows a capsule that was made by Osmia avosetta, and the image at the bottom shows several capsules buried in the ground at a nesting site in Turkey
Osmia avosetta builds its nesting capsules with petals from the flowers Onobrychis vicilifolia or Hedysarum elymaiticum (depending on the region). The bee uses its mandibles to trim the petals and then carries each of the pieces back to its nesting site, where the petals are carefully folded together and then formed into several small, rounded capsules. Nectar and mud are both used to "glue" the petals together.
As this article describes:
Both practical and beautiful, the mother bee first sources the perfect petals and brings them back to her nest site. She then digs a 1.5 cm-deep burrow and lays down multiple layers of overlapping petals and mud. After filling the nest with nutritious pollen and nectar, she then lays her precious egg on top. Finally, she seals the cell by folding the scale-like petals inwards and plugging the hole with mud. While the exterior dries like a hard shell, the interior stays humid, allowing a cozy environment for the larvae to grow and mature as they wait out the winter.
Above: the inside of a nesting capsule, with a tiny egg resting atop a glob of pollen and nectar
The finished capsules are a colorful, delicate patchwork of pink, purple, blue, and yellow flower petals.
This species was first discovered and described in 2009. Two separate research teams in two different countries actually discovered the species on the very same day; one team discovered it at a site in Turkey while the other discovered it in Iran, and the two teams then published their findings together in a single paper.
Above: more capsules from the nesting site in Turkey
Osmia avosetta has scarcely been documented in the 16 years that have passed since its discovery, and the research that has been published on this species primarily focuses on the nesting behavior. There are very few photos of the actual bees themselves.
Above: Osmia bee from Turkey
The photos of the nesting capsules are pretty stunning, though.
There are several other mason bees that use flower petals and/or leaves to line their nests, and bees of the family Megachilidae are also known to engage in a similar behavior, as I explained in my previous post about petalcutter and leafcutter bees.
Sources & More Info:
My Modern Met: Rare Bee Species Makes Colorful Nests from Flower Petals
NPR: Busy Bees Use Flower Petals for Nest Wallpaper
American Museum Novitates: Nests, Petal Usage, Floral Preferences, and Immatures of Osmia avosetta, Including Biological Comparisons with Other Osmiine Bees
Acta Scientific Agriculture: Nature's Architects: Exploring the Biology, Behavior, and Pollination Impact of Mason Bees
Strange Bedfellows: these unprecedented photos show a leafcutter bee sharing its nest with a wolfspider
I stumbled across these photos while I was looking for information about leafcutter bees, and I just wanted to share them, because they're really remarkable. The images were captured by an amateur photographer named Laurence Sanders, and they depict an unprecedented scene that garnered the attention of both entomologists and arachnologists.
The photos show a leafcutter bee and a wolfspider living in the same burrow.
The leafcutter bee (Megachile macularis) can be seen fetching freshly-cut leaves, which she'll use to line the inner walls of her nest, while the wolfspider sits at the entryway to the burrow; as the bee approaches, the wolfspider moves aside, allowing her to enter the nest, and then she simply watches as the leaf is positioned along the inner wall.
Once the leaf is in position, the bee and the spider seem to inspect the nest together, sitting side-by-side in the entryway. The leafcutter bee seems strangely at ease in the presence of the wolfspider, which is normally a voracious predator, and the wolfspider seems equally unfazed by the fact that it shares its burrow with an enormous stinging insect.
The man who took these photographs discovered the peculiar scene by accident, and he then captured a series of images over the course of about two days (these are just a few of the photos that were taken). During that two-day period, the bee was seen entering the nest with bits of foliage dozens of times, gradually constructing the walls and brood chambers of its nest, and the spider was clearly occupying the same burrow, but they did not exhibit any signs of aggression toward one another.
The photos have been examined by various entomologists and arachnologists, and those experts seem ubiquitously surprised by the behavior that these images depict. The curator of entomology at Victoria Museum, Dr. Ken Walker, noted that this may be the very first time that this behavior has ever been documented, while Dr. Robert Raven, an arachnid expert at the Queensland Museum, described it as a "bizarre" situation.
This arrangement is completely unheard of, and the photos are truly remarkable.
Sources & More Info:
Brisbane Times: The Odd Couple: keen eye spies bee and spider bedfellows in 'world-first'
iNaturalist: Megachile macularis
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