I love this shot, my eye spends time enjoying the sculptured landscape of the head and thorax with the contrasting of bright ruff hairs against general blackness. Oh,.... this is Megachile apicalis. A non-North American species, but caught, actually, in North America. One would suppose that invasive bees like our friend here would be generalists, but you would be wrong. Some are true specialists and some just have strong preferences. I am not sure it is well quantified, but my guess would be that invasive bees (including honey bees) , on average favor invasive plants over natives. What a lovely survey paper that would be. Our specialist at hand here is a lover of knapweeds (Centaurea), most of which are also not native to the continent. Yet, some of our non-native weeds are huge pollen and nectar providers. But who do ("doth" sounds better here don't you think?; sad that its illegal to use that word anymore) they provide for? Mostly non-native insects with the odd generalist native I believe. Arguments are made that such non-native species are really not so bad (look! they get bees on them!), but this strikes me as similar to saying that house sparrows, starlings and pigeons are all the birds we really need. Maybe that is true, but I am not interested in the world of lawn lovers ("lawn lover" is now in the breech as a new insult, but not yet, so I can still use it in a sentence) who are satisfied with an edging of cultivated weeds. Photo by Heagan Ahmed.