mason bee sex

I sent these backyard photos to a few computer vision tools with results ranging from wrong to interesting.  I also asked questions using a conversational search engine about the size of male mason bees.
 

iPhone Visual Look Up is for identifying all objects (food, objects and living things too) in photos and videos on the iPhone.  For these photos Visual Look Up produced wrong or slightly wrong answers - Western Honey Bee and Osmia Rufa.

iNaturalist is for recording observations of individual living things, particularly things that can be tied to a species name.  iNat uses photos with a date, location, and crowdsourced identification. iNat's response to the last photo was Genus Osmia (139 native species of mason bee in North America). 

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text.  Perplexity's response to, "Are male mason bees smaller or larger than female mason bees?"  Click on the small numbers that link the response to a reference.

Male mason bees are smaller than female mason bees. Females are larger than males, with shorter, thicker antennae. Mason bees are generally much smaller than honey bees or bumblebees, measuring only about 1/4 inch long1

This size difference is a notable characteristic of mason bees, with males being noticeably smaller than females, typically around 7-15 millimeters long in most North American species3

ChatGPT - what do you know about honey bees?

Here is my experience with asking ChatGPT about honey bees.

• easy to use 
• replied quickly with niche knowledge about honey bees
• challenges web search business
  
• if a portion of the reply is incorrect, I pressed the "Regenerate" button; the screenshot is the best reply after 5 tries; including "simple terms" in the request kept the reply short
  

A.I. Art responds to my words

Often funny or disappointing, yet occasionally worth sharing - artificial intelligence (AI) responded to my words and painted a picture.  I discovered the AI software from a recent New York Times article and  jumped-in with a sentence from a beekeeping book, "At the Hive Entrance" by H. Storch (page 5). 

In hindsight, perhaps I should have read the wiki page or visited twitter to understand successful use of the software. Both a time wasting exercise or a discovery of something unexpected - here are some of the software limitations:

• a request for more than 3 objects
• negation
• numbers
• connected sentences