Cleptoparasitic — lays in other bees' nests
Bees living this way. Around ninety per cent of bee species are solitary, and the social ones people picture when they think of bees are a small and unrepresentative minority.
8 records · social structure
- Cuckoo beesNomada, Sphecodes, Coelioxys and allied generaBees that build no nest, gather no pollen and feed no young of their own. A cuckoo bee female finds another bee's provisioned cell, slips in, and lays her egg on somebody else's pollen store; her larva then kills the host's egg or larva and eats the food it was left. It sounds like a marginal aberration and it is not — cleptoparasitism has evolved repeatedly across the order, and a healthy bee fauna is expected to contain a substantial number of these.
- Cuckoo bumblebeesBombus subgenus PsithyrusBumblebees that have given up building nests, gathering pollen and producing workers. A cuckoo bumblebee queen invades a host colony, kills or subdues the resident queen, and forces the host's own workers to raise her offspring. They are bumblebees in every anatomical respect except the ones that matter for making a living, and they are a genuine part of a healthy bumblebee fauna rather than a problem in it.
- Sharp-tailed beesCoelioxysCuckoo bees that specialise in leafcutters, and the females of which carry a striking piece of equipment: a sharply pointed, blade-like abdomen tip used to slit open a host's sealed leaf cell and insert an egg. The larva that hatches has enlarged jaws for killing the host's own larva, then moults into an ordinary-looking grub and eats the pollen loaf somebody else collected.
- Blood beesSphecodesSmall, near-hairless, wasp-like cleptoparasites with a striking blood-red abdomen against a black head and thorax. They parasitise sweat bees and mining bees, and unlike most cuckoo bees they frequently enter a host nest and kill the host's egg or larva directly rather than leaving the work to their own offspring.
- Mourning beesMelectaBlack, sparsely haired cleptoparasites marked with tufts of white hair, parasitising the digger bees whose nests they follow. They emerge with their hosts in early spring and patrol the same old walls and earth banks, and their name records the funereal colouring rather than any behaviour.
- Nomad beesNomadaThe most numerous group of cuckoo bees, and the ones most often mistaken for wasps. Nomada are near-hairless, boldly marked in red, yellow and black, and they patrol mining bee aggregations searching for provisioned cells. Many species parasitise a single host species, which makes their flight periods narrow and their distributions a map of somebody else's.
- Vestal cuckoo bumblebeeBombus vestalisThe commonest cuckoo bumblebee in southern Britain, and a specialist parasite of the buff-tailed bumblebee. A female invades an established colony, kills or subdues the resident queen, and the host workers then raise her offspring — which means the host colony's own reproduction ends entirely.
- Dark beesStelisSmall, dark, sparsely haired cleptoparasites that target the cavity-nesting megachilids — mason bees, leafcutters, scissor bees and resin bees. They are among the parasites that turn up in a bee hotel, and their presence indicates a host population large enough to be worth exploiting rather than a problem to be solved.
Other social structure groups
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