Scopa — dense hairs on the hind leg
Dense dry hairs on the hind leg. Pollen is held loosely, sheds readily in flight, and that shedding is pollination.
32 records · how they carry pollen
- Mining beesAndrenaSolitary ground-nesting bees, and the small volcano-shaped mounds of fine soil that appear on lawns and bare paths in April are theirs. Mining bees are the classic spring solitary bees of the northern hemisphere: short-lived, entirely harmless, often nesting in dense aggregations that look like a colony but are not, and a great many of them are specialists that visit only one kind of flower.
- Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.
- Sweat beesHalictidaeThe bees that land on your arm in hot weather, and the group that breaks the tidy division between solitary and social bees more thoroughly than anything else in the order. Some sweat bees are strictly solitary, some form small colonies with a queen and workers, and a number switch between the two depending on latitude, altitude and season — the same species living socially in a warm valley and solitarily on the hill above it. They are also small, abundant, easily overlooked, and among the most important wild pollinators in temperate and tropical agriculture alike.
- Ivy beeColletes hederaeA bee that was not recognised as a species until 1993, was unknown in Britain until 2001, and is now one of the commonest autumn bees across southern England. The ivy bee emerges in September, forages almost exclusively on ivy flowers, nests in enormous ground aggregations, and is gone by November. It is one of the few insects whose entire annual cycle is built around a single plant, and one of the clearest records anyone has of a species expanding its range in real time.
- Squash beesEucera subgenus Peponapis and XenoglossaBees that fly before dawn to reach flowers that close by mid-morning, and that feed their young on the pollen of one plant family and no other. Squash bees are specialists on Cucurbita — pumpkin, squash, courgette and the wild gourds those crops came from — and they spread across North America with the crop as Indigenous farmers carried it north from Mexico. In many squash fields they do the whole job of pollination before the contracted honey bees have got up.
- Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
- Tawny mining beeAndrena fulvaThe bright orange bee that appears on lawns in April and produces small volcano-shaped mounds of soil, prompting a great many alarmed enquiries about infestations. It is a solitary bee, it is entirely harmless, the mounds disappear within weeks, and it is one of the most conspicuous and most misidentified insects of the British spring.
- Digger beesAnthophoraFast, furry, bumblebee-like solitary bees that hover in front of a flower before darting into it, and among the earliest substantial bees of the spring. The hairy-footed flower bee is the one most British gardeners meet — the females black and the males gingery, so different that they were long thought to be separate species — and it is a specialist of deep tubular flowers that honey bees cannot use.
- Plasterer beesColletesSolitary ground-nesting bees that line their cells with a self-produced plastic. A female Colletes paints the walls of each cell with a secretion applied by her short forked tongue, which polymerises into a transparent, waterproof, cellophane-like membrane — a genuine biological polyester, and one of the most remarkable materials any insect makes. It waterproofs the cell against the damp sandy ground these bees prefer.
- Small carpenter beesCeratinaTiny, shiny, metallic dark-green or blue-black bees that excavate nests in the soft pith of broken stems — bramble, raspberry, elder, sumac — and then, unusually for a solitary bee, stay with their offspring. A Ceratina mother guards her nest through development and in some species is still alive when her young emerge, which puts the genus at one of the evolutionary staging posts between solitary living and true sociality.
- Alkali beeNomia melanderiA ground-nesting American bee managed at a scale nothing else matches: growers in the Walla Walla valley of Washington State build and irrigate artificial salt-crusted nesting beds covering hectares, in which millions of females nest, and then farm alfalfa seed around them. It is the only significant case anywhere of a wild ground-nesting bee being managed by engineering its habitat rather than by housing it.
- Ashy mining beeAndrena cinerariaOne of the most strikingly marked solitary bees in Europe, and one of the easiest to recognise: a black bee with two clean bands of ash-grey hair across the thorax and a distinctly blue-black shine to the abdomen. It nests in lawns, banks and short turf in loose aggregations, and it is entirely harmless to anyone standing over it.
- Hairy-footed flower beeAnthophora plumipesA fast, furry, hovering bee that appears in gardens in early March and is regularly reported as two different species, because the sexes look nothing alike: the females are entirely black with orange pollen brushes, the males gingery-brown with long feathery hairs on their middle legs. It is one of the earliest substantial bees of the year and a specialist of the deep spring flowers honey bees cannot reach.
- Oil-collecting beesMacropisBees that collect floral oil instead of nectar, and one of the few groups that overturn the usual description of what a bee does. Macropis females gather fatty oil from specialised glands on yellow loosestrife flowers, mix it with pollen to provision their cells, and use it again to waterproof the nest — which lets them nest in damp ground where other bees cannot. The relationship is obligate in both directions.
- Fairy beesPerditaThe smallest bees on earth, and among the most specialised. Perdita minima is under two millimetres long — smaller than a grain of rice, small enough that its shadow is easier to see than the bee — and the genus as a whole is a radiation of tiny desert specialists, most of which provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus and fly for only a few weeks a year.
- Yellow-legged mining beeAndrena flavipesOne of the few European mining bees with two generations a year, which makes it visible from March right through to September while most of its relatives have a few weeks and disappear. It nests in dense aggregations that can run to many thousands of burrows in a single south-facing bank, and it is among the commonest and most watchable solitary bees in southern Britain.
- Large scabious mining beeAndrena hattorfianaA large, scarce mining bee that provisions its cells with the pollen of field scabious and its close relatives, and nothing else. It is one of the clearest examples in northern Europe of an obligate specialist: where the plant goes, the bee goes, and its decline tracks the loss of unimproved chalk grassland almost exactly.
- Violet carpenter beeXylocopa violaceaOne of Europe's largest and most spectacular bees — a jet-black insect the size of a small bird with wings that flash iridescent violet in sunlight. It excavates nest tunnels in dead wood, and it has expanded northwards across Europe over recent decades, reaching southern England where it was formerly a rarity.
- Pantaloon beeDasypoda hirtipesA mining bee with the most extravagant pollen brushes of any European species — enormous golden hair fans on the hind legs that look like a pair of feathered trousers and give the bee its name. It is a sandy-soil specialist working composites, and a female returning to her burrow loaded with pollen is one of the more comic sights in British entomology.
- Sea aster beeColletes halophilusA plasterer bee restricted almost entirely to saltmarsh and coastal grazing marsh in southeast England and adjacent Europe, provisioning its cells with the pollen of sea aster and flying only in the few weeks that plant is in flower. It is a globally scarce species with a substantial share of its world population in the Thames and Essex estuaries.
- Bryony beeAndrena floreaA mining bee that provisions its cells exclusively with the pollen of white bryony, a hedgerow climber that most people know only as a weed. It is a strict specialist on a single plant species, it has expanded its British range substantially over recent decades, and it exists as a network of small populations wherever that one climber grows.
- Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
- Augochlora beesAugochloraBrilliant metallic green sweat bees that nest in rotting wood rather than in soil — unusual among halictids, and the reason they persist in closed woodland where ground-nesting bees cannot. Augochlora pura is a common and dazzling bee of eastern North American forest, and it is entirely solitary despite belonging to a largely social family.
- Great banded furrow beeHalictus scabiosaeA large, boldly banded sweat bee that has expanded rapidly northwards across Europe and reached southern England within the last two decades. It is socially flexible — nests may be solitary or contain several females with one reproducing — and it is one of the most conspicuous halictids anyone in northern Europe is likely to meet.
- Sharp-collared furrow beeLasioglossum malachurumA small sweat bee that is one of the best-studied examples of primitive eusociality anywhere. A single foundress produces a first brood of small workers who forage for her, and only later are reproductive females produced — a genuine caste system without the sharp physical separation honey bees show, and one that switches on and off with latitude.
- Early mining beeAndrena haemorrhoaOne of the commonest and earliest mining bees in northern Europe, and among the first solitary bees most people see each year. It has a neat combination of markings that makes it genuinely identifiable in the field, which is unusual in a genus of 1,500 species, and it nests in lawns and banks in loose aggregations.
- Vernal colletesColletes cuniculariusA large spring plasterer bee that emerges in March for willow catkins and forms some of the most spectacular nesting aggregations in northern Europe — tens of thousands of burrows in a single dune slope, with clouds of males patrolling above them waiting for females to emerge.
- Eastern carpenter beeXylocopa virginicaNorth America's familiar large carpenter bee, and the one that hovers menacingly in front of people around porches and decking each spring. The hovering is done by males, which have no sting whatsoever. It excavates remarkably clean round tunnels in dead softwood, and unusually for a solitary bee it shows the beginnings of social behaviour — related females may share a nest with one reproducing.
- Blunthorn beesMelittaGround-nesting bees from one of the oldest bee lineages, and mostly tight floral specialists. Melitta species provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus — bellflowers, knapweed, heather or bird's-foot trefoil depending on the species — and they belong to a family that includes the oil-collecting bees and is now thought to contain the closest living relatives of the ancestral bee.
- Shaggy beesPanurgusSmall, entirely black bees with conspicuously shaggy pollen brushes, found almost exclusively on yellow composites. They nest in bare sandy ground in aggregations, and the males have a habit of sleeping inside closed flower heads overnight — several can be found packed into a single hawkbit on a cool morning.
- Long-horned beeEucera longicornisA declining British bee whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the species several bee orchids have evolved to impersonate. The orchid produces a flower resembling a female Eucera in shape, texture and scent closely enough that males attempt to mate with it, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany.
- Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.
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