Orchid bees

How to recognise it

Medium to large bees, often spectacularly metallic — emerald green, gold, copper, blue or violet — with very long tongues that in some species exceed body length and are folded back under the body in flight. Males have conspicuously swollen hind tibiae containing the perfume-storage chambers.

• Brilliant metallic colouring unlike almost anything else at that size.
• An extremely long tongue, often trailing behind the bee in flight.
• Males with visibly swollen, almost bulbous hind legs.
• Found only in the American tropics.

Body length 8–30 mm (typically 18 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Solitary

Each female builds and provisions her own nest with no workers and no caste. Most of the world's bee species.

Nesting

Existing cavities and tubes; Resin-lined cavities; Hollow stems and plant cavities

Most species are solitary, building cells of resin, mud and plant material in cavities, under branches or in banks. A minority are communal or primitively social, with several females sharing a nest. The resin used in construction is collected from the same forest that supplies the perfumes.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Active year-round in the tropics, with abundance tracking flowering and rainfall.

Lifecycle

1. 1Perfume collectionThe male scrapes volatile compounds from orchid flowers, fungi, resin and rotting wood using brushes on his front legs, transfers them to the hind tibial chambers, and accumulates a blend over weeks. The blend appears to function as a signal of the male's foraging competence and experience.
2. 2Display and matingMales display at perches, releasing the accumulated perfume. Females assess and choose. No other bee has anything comparable.
3. 3NestingFemales build and provision cells alone, or in loose communal groups, and the larvae develop on stored pollen and nectar.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Lowland and montane tropical rainforest, forest fragments, plantations and gardens within the neotropics.

Distribution

Mexico south through Central America to southern Brazil and Bolivia, with one species introduced to Florida.

Behaviour

Fast, powerful, long-distance fliers. Individual males have been tracked moving many kilometres in a day, and mark-recapture work suggests foraging ranges among the largest of any bee. That range is what makes them so important to forest trees growing at very low density — an orchid bee can carry pollen between two individuals of a rare tree species kilometres apart, which almost nothing else can.

Pollination role

Keystone pollinators of neotropical forest. Their long tongues open up deep flowers nothing else can reach, and their range links widely scattered individual trees. Around 700 orchid species depend on male euglossine bees exclusively for pollination, attaching pollen packets to the bee while it collects perfume and offering no nectar reward at all — a pure deception system built entirely on the perfume behaviour. Brazil nut trees are the best-known economic case: they require large-bodied euglossine and related bees, and the crop cannot be grown in plantations without them.

Very high, and functionally irreplaceable for a substantial set of forest plants.

What it forages on

Females forage broadly for pollen and nectar, favouring deep tubular flowers their tongues can reach. Males visit orchids for perfume rather than for food, which is a different relationship entirely.

Honey

Produces no honey

None. Mostly solitary, with provisions sized per cell. Their corbiculate relatives — honey bees, bumblebees and stingless bees — all store honey, which makes the orchid bees the outlier in that group.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Not managed, and disproportionately studied because males can be lured with synthetic scent compounds — a chemical bait pad in a rainforest will attract dozens within minutes. That has made them one of the best-surveyed tropical insect groups and a standard indicator for forest quality.

Conservation

Sensitive to deforestation and fragmentation, and used as an indicator group precisely for that reason. Because Brazil nut production depends on them, their decline has a directly measurable economic consequence — one of the clearest cases anywhere of pollinator loss with a price attached.