Sunday, September 5, 2021

A new experience for me

 New experience for me

We aren't travelling much, so I have to look for my natural history observations at a different scale around my home. Lately, I have been watching the diversity of bees attracted to the flowers in our containers. I also had a chance to see the next generation being provisioned as I watched a solitary bee create its nest and cap it over the course of several days. It would fly up with loafs of pollen and take them in to the top of a bamboo stake. It came and went quickly, but at the end, when it was capping its next, I was able to get a few photos.

The bee flew up with piece of leaf which it appeared to chew into a paste and used it to plug the end of the nest. I hope I have a new set of pollinators in the spring

a black and white cavity nesting solitary bee plugging the end of its next with a paste of plant material

a black and white cavity nesting solitary bee showing the peice of leaf that it is using to create a plug at the end of a nest in a bamboo tube

a nest of a cavity nesting solitary bee showing the end plugged with a green paste to seal the end
 
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Alumroot's Photo Blog by Alan Wolf is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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