Yellow-butt Bee

One day, while out in the gardens, Patty texted me (very hi tech she is), "there is a cool bee with a yellow butt over here". So I went to see. And then I went to get a camera.

So of course it flew off.

But it came back, and I got a few more shots. Enough to see that it was pollen that made the bee's butt yellow.

It took awhile but eventually, and with a bit of luck, I was able to identify it as a Carpenter-mimic Leafcutter Bee, Megachile xylocopoides.* 

This is a female, as they have a wider butt than the males.

If you look closely (although even bigafied it is still hard to see) you'll see this bee has very large mandibles, used to slice up foliage. Hence the common name.

We've had quite a few bees buzzing about our gardens this year. Which is very cool. I've just got to figure out how to get them to stay still for portraits. A project for next year perhaps.

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You can find all of the Yard Critter posts listed here.

* If you click that link it will take you to BugGuide, an excellent resource for identifying insects, spiders and related creatures living in North America. And the specific page linked is of an image taken by Pat Sutton, a friend of ours. And if it wasn't for an offhand remark during a webinar on Fall Garden Cleanup that Pat was giving, were she showed a picture of a Yellow-butt Bee, and noting that it was a Carpenter-mimic Leafcutter Bee, I never would have identified this critter. So it was pretty cool that when I did an internet search for this critter the link I choose to click on was Pat's image.