Festooning, bearding, and air conditioning are some of the cutest things bees do. When you take frames out of busy lower supers, you will usually always get a bee “daisy chain” of festooners trying to keep you from tugging the frame out.
The air conditioning is my favorite, though. You will see a little line of workers sitting at the front of the hive with their butts facing the entrance, and they will all start rapidly buzzing their wings. They’re blowing “cooler” air into the entrance to try and bring the hive temperature down so that the gals inside can work more efficiently.
Female swallowtails are dimorphic, meaning two distinct phenotypes (morphs) exist. In the dark morph, areas that are normally yellow are replaced with black or dark gray. The signature “tiger stripe” pattern can still be seen on the underside of some dark females. These butterflies live in deciduous broadleaf woods, forest edges, river valleys, parks, and suburbs of the eastern United States.
Milionia basalis (Geometridae) is a species of butterfly found in Japan, N.E. Himalaya, Burma and Sundaland, which occurs in a number of distinct races. The brilliant colored M. basalis pyrozona has been recorded in Peninsular Malaysia and Burma.
Q:When I was a child, I saw something that changed my mind about wasps forever. My dad was doing some cabin construction work and I was hanging out at the site. Some other guy had half-crushed a wasp with a hammer, but it was still alive. As I watched, a second wasp flew to its side, and stroked it -actually stroked it, with what I can I can only describe as tenderness - with its antennae until the injured wasp stopped moving and died. Then the second wasp flew away, and I did not see it again.
She was probably trying to communicate with her sister, probably trying to tell her to come back to the nest or share information about the area, and was very confused by the distorted responses she was getting, likely mixed with scent-based distress signals.
When the responses stopped, she probably went home and told the others to be on alert for danger :(
I’m not anthropomorphizing a bit here. Social wasps groom one another, share a LOT of information, get stressed when separated
from their close relatives, and they recognize one another visually, like we humans do, by the fact that every single one has a unique face, even in the same “hive:”
I almost feel bad for my seemingly irreparable phobia of them now.
The spider catches the bee and the bee stings the spider. Both are dead, with the bee’s stinger still in the spider. This is a great example showing why honey bees die after stinging something only once. Their stinger/venom sac are attached to other organs inside the bee, so when the stinger’s barbs lodge into something, everything gets pulled out, potentially including gut, etc and leaving a gaping hole in the bees abdomen. (From Here)
Undoubtedly the Blue Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa caerulea (Hymenoptera - Apidae) is one of the most striking among the carpenter bees. It is a large bee, close to an inch in length, with a hairy blue thorax, black abdomen, and long black eyes.
These Asian bees are non-aggressive. They nest in wood, and are semi-solitary, it is that they don’t have hives like honey bees do, but sometimes several queens will share a common entry hole to their nest. Since carpenter bees nest in dead wood, they sometimes do damage to the leaves of old houses, and can be pests. However, they are important pollinators of both native and agricultural plants, which more than makes up for the occasional damage they do to already-rotten wood. Being large and strong bees, the flowers pollinated by these bees may have an especially strong architecture.
