#QuestionOfTheDay for a fighting tournament of all fictional characters, which 2 fictional characters would you want as your TV commentary team? Pick one for play-by-play and one for colour commentary/analysis.
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The huge carpenter bees in the garden (genus Xylocopa) continue to fascinate me, & this is one of my favourite pictures to date 🙂👍
It shows the subtle dichotomy of the gorgeous wing colouring – a bright metallic violet-blue in reflection & a deep crimson in transmission ❤️
The light dusting of yellow pollen offsets the otherwise dark head & body nicely 🙇♂️
#Photography 📷
#BugOfTheDay 🪰
#MacroPhotography 🔬
#InsectsOfMastodon 🕸️
#BackGardenEntomology 🪲
The huge carpenter bees in the garden (genus Xylocopa) continue to fascinate me, & this is one of my favourite pictures to date 🙂👍
It shows the subtle dichotomy of the gorgeous wing colouring – a bright metallic violet-blue in reflection & a deep crimson in transmission ❤️
The light dusting of yellow pollen offsets the otherwise dark head & body nicely 🙇♂️
#Photography 📷
#BugOfTheDay 🪰
#MacroPhotography 🔬
#InsectsOfMastodon 🕸️
#BackGardenEntomology 🪲
Since photographing these bees, I've learned that it's very difficult to differentiate between the violet carpenter bee (Xylocopa violacea) & the splay-footed one (X. valga), hence the fuzzy ID here.
And I should point out that this is a macro stack of two shots, one for the in-focus antennae, & the other for everything else.
And although this picture of another carpenter bee is nothing like as crisp overall, I can't resist sharing it too.
Not only does it illustrate the wings in their full metallic violet-blue glory, but it also captures a fleeting moment of garden drama, as a small spider crawls on the bee's head & a honey bee cruises in from behind.
It just goes to show how big the carpenter bees are 🙀
#Photography 📷
#BugOfTheDay 🪰
#MacroPhotography 🔬
#InsectsOfMastodon 🕸️
#BackGardenEntomology 🪲
Note: as many people have kindly pointed out, the foreground bee is very unlikely to be a normal honey bee, Apis mellifera, as it’s too small & too shiny.
Not sure exactly what kind it is, perhaps a sweat bee.
While that diminishes the size comparison with the carpenter bee, the latter remain objectively huge, the largest European bees🙂
Remarkable photo. But I don't think the small bee is a honeybee (Apis mellifera)? It's tiny, adreniform... and I can't find it in the "Common Bees of Eastern North America" ... which makes sense since the large bee is Xylocopa californica I think? Meaning this is a photo from out west.
I know that Apis mellifera has many color variations, but this small bee almost has a green/blue sheen and I've never seen that. The eyes also seem too small... but this angle is hard.
Since you saw it in person do you remember how small it was? Is there another angle? This is driving me crazy. I'm not really good at bees... but this will bug me until I know.
It COULD be Apis mellifera. I can't really rule that out... they are kind of diverse in color... but still.
Dialictus is a subgenus of sweat bees belonging to the genus Lasiolossum. Most of the members of this subgenus have a metallic appearance, while some are non-metallic. There are over 630 species worldwide.They are commonly found in temporal regions and are found in abundance in North America. Members of this subgenus also have very diverse forms of social structure making them model organisms for studying the social behavior of bees. (Source: Wikipedia, '', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialictus, CC BY-SA 3.0 . Photo: (c) Katja Schulz, some rights reserved (CC BY), uploaded by Katja Schulz)
Way too small for a honey bee. Says an ex-beekeeper who regularly sees this carpenter bee in her garden.
Apart from size, the little bee’s body looks different, too. I found this picture for comparison
(source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM9Ccgcv3W8 )
come to think of it, maybe Max @StrepsipZerg can help with identification?
(and that’s a follow recommendation, too 🙂)
@nellie_m @futurebird Thank you.
That said, @StrepsipZerg doesn’t seem to be active here any more, & besides, he has the temerity to suggest in his bio that his cats are cuter than mine. The management dispute that claim 😻🤪
@markmccaughrean @futurebird @StrepsipZerg
oh, I’ve tagged him a few times and he’s always been so kind as to answer, so unless he left very recently I think there’s still a chance!
Would be nice to know what kind of bee it is, because apart from honey bees, I don’t know the first thing about them 🫣
Another great photo. Is that honeybee a queen? She looks rather long.
I’d be surprised if she was, because they don’t usually go out on their own to forage, but I agree, she does look a little long. I’ve been fooled a couple of times, though, until the real queen appeared and removed all doubt 😆 Mature queens only leave the hive in a swarm, and young princesses leave to find drones, not food. I don’t think they’d waste time on that.
It’s great, but not my picture, I linked to the youtube source above.
@MennoWolff Oh yes – it's almost mandatory for some macro shooting, as the depth of focus of any given image can be very shallow.
There are various tools available for doing so automatically, & PhotoShop has it as an option, to auto-align & auto-blend layers.
In this case though, I did it manually, carefully cutting out the in focus antennae from one picture & blending it over the soft focus ones in the other frame.
@Nazani They are pretty rustic in their flying style, that's true.
I saw three of them at once today – I wasn't sure quite how many we have.
Normally, they buzz around like mad, busy in their work. But for a brief period of a couple of minutes, two of them settled motionless on separate flowers a metre or two apart.
Most odd.
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