Bicolored Striped-Sweat Bee - Agapostemon virescens
Most Bees are associated with colorations that sport prominent yellows and blacks, but they can actually come in a wider array of colors that one could possibly imagine. Today’s species is a lovely metallic green! Moreover, there are tropical Bees that are bright blue, purple, white, and even some with traces of red along their exoskeleton or in the from of hairs (which may or may not be fashioned into a Red Belt)! Genuinely, the coloration is astounding and beautiful, and it only makes the world of Bees that much more enticing to explore. That’s why for today’s post and the following post, this blog will showcase two particular green colored Bees which at first glance may resemble the fabled Jewel Wasp, but are in fact Bees from the family Halictidae. That’s a bit of mouthful, so we can instead call them by their common name: Sweat Bees, so named due to their attraction to sweat from the human body. As discussed in an older post featuring the Texas Striped Sweat Bee (A. texanus), sweat is a valuable source of salt for insects, so if an opportunity to collect salt directly from sweat arises, it is too great an opportunity to ignore. In fact, it’s better to get there first before other insects arrive and claim sweat for themselves. Although it sounds unnerving, the female Sweat Bee’s sting is fairly week, so even if you consider them a nuisance, they present no real threat to you if you’re walking or running in the park. In fact, allowing one to land on you may present you with a valuable opportunity to observe them in action.
While a nearby Sweat Bee would be interesting, it’s worth nothing that you shouldn’t count on them landing on you, even if you actively seek them out as these insects are very skittish and eager to escape a perceived threat. From my experience, aside from observing them on flowers, it’s better to sit down after some physical activity and let them come to you. Of course, sweat isn’t all they consume as a part of their diet. These Bees do as most other Hymenopterans do and supplement their diet using nectar and pollen from a wide variety of flowers. This individual has a lot of surface area to cover on this echinacea flower, and plenty to feast on as a result. Female Bicolored Bees need to gather what they can to provision their nests and the larvae within. In a similar manner to Digger Wasps, they also nest in the ground and have earthen cells that contain their burgeoning larvae. Unlike those predacious insects, however, these diligent Bees line their cells with gathered pollen instead of paralyzed insects or spiders. It’s quite an interesting ecological niche that these Bees have going on. As well, while the aforementioned Digger Wasps are solitary hunters, Sweat Bees such as this one may join forces and cooperate socially within a single burrow. It’s not quite an insect colony in terms of eusocial structuring; there are no castes or delegation of labor, nor is there honey to be made. It’s simply a potential handful of individuals cooperating under one soil-covered roof, and that cooperation can make potentially make nest construction and maintenance much more economic...especially since Sweat Bees won’t be carnivorously hunting for their food.
Pictures were taken on June 26, 2018 with a Samsung Galaxy S4. For the blog’s next post, another new species of Agapostemon Bee that calls Ontario home will fly in.
