First bee of the season

[randy_byers]

The raspberries have just started to blossom, and I saw my first bee of the year. I still don't know what kind they are. This one was pretty much as I remembered the bees that have shown up the past couple of years since the local wild honey bees apparently died off. It was a little bit bigger than a honey bee, quite hairy, with bands or areas of black and a pale, buttery yellow. It may be a mason bee, but it's not the Orchard Mason Bee, which seems to be all black with a metallic green or blue sheen, from the pictures I've seen. Is this some kind of bumblebee instead? I guess I did see a bumblebee earlier this year -- not in my garden -- that was what I think of as the traditional kind, with lots of black and a few bands of bright yellow.

This hornfaced bee is close in coloration and hairiness to the bee I saw in the raspberries. I guess the hornfaced bee is another type of mason bee, so maybe that's it. I'll have to look for the horns next time.

Hm, just stumbled upon this page about the type of garden plants that attract mason bees. Raspberries are on the list. "There are about 3,500 species of native bees in the USA," it says. Good luck identifying the species in your garden, it might as well say.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I had a minor fascination with bees a couple years ago, when I first moved into 4119, and wanted to set up a bee garden, but lost interest after a while. Bees are great, I think, and plants that attract them are usually neat plants.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've never paid a lot of attention to bees, and what attention I have paid has been a byproduct of gardening. I've been planning to expand a bed out front just on general principles (the slow project of getting rid of the lawn), and maybe I'll use the opportunity to plant some bee-friendly flowers. Maybe monkshood, which relies on bumblebees for pollination.