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

a gateway to wild bee conservation

This UK purchased bee habitat contained paper straws for Mason Bees.  Over time I replaced paper straws with more durable reeds.  This winter the reeds were sealed with mud, but recently I discovered holes and more recently discovered Mining Bees entering the reeds.  Typically I find Mining Bees tidying their entrance holes beneath our shrubs.    For a write up and images of Mining Bees, have a look at the Mark Schlueter's website, Bees of Georgia.

NPR ran a story, "Honeybees Help Farmers, But They Don't Help The Environment" which has a link to an editorial news article.  The editorial contains a photo of commercial beekeeping in what appears to be a high plains desert environment in Spain - probably not a environmentally appropriate place to drop lots of bee hives.  From a urban beekeeper point of view, I'm left with no moral concerns.  Whoever has not used a shocking news/blog title raise your righteous hand.

2017 nectar flow

Bee cooperative weather is supporting a strong nectar flow of holly bushes, white clover, spiderwort and tulip poplar. Native mining bees and carpenter bees are extremely active too.

This year, I started to checkerboard the honey cap of over-wintered hives on March 6th. Since then, I check the honey cap every three weeks. My version of checkerboarding uses foundation-less frames with no drawn comb. Yesterday, I added another medium box to each hive. I don't know how long this nectar flow will last, but I have monstrously tall hives.

My swarm capture is drawing comb and growing in size too, but at a much slower pace than over-wintered hives.  

Hawthorn tree and native pollinators

The Druid Hills Tour of Homes & Gardens featured a home with a huge number of pollinators visiting a hawthorn tree in bloom.   Most of the pollinators are not the familiar apis mellifera.   I'm not completely sure, but these pollinators appear to be Small Carpenter Bees.  I used two resources, the XERCES guide -Attracting Native Pollinators and Bees of Georgia website by Mark Schlueter.   Notice the pollen baskets. These natives are similar in size to apis mellifera, not shown.

Mining Bees; subfamily Andrena

I discovered hundreds of small holes in the ground, mostly beneath our shrubs.  The mining bees are having a grand time foraging and tidying their entrance holes.  I'm using the book, Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat, to identify these native solitary bees.