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My sister  and I are just 2 of the 50,000 girls that keep our colony running. We do not have babies ourselves so we dedicate  our time to helping our mom (the Queen) reproduce. We were nurses in our younger days, helping our baby sisters develop into grown-ups. Now we are older, so we do more risky tasks such as collecting food and defending the colony.

So glad to be here, especially with Anthophora because I’m admittedly a bit codependent on her. I’m known as a “digger cuckoo bee” because I parasitize the nests of bees like Anthophora. I find her nest and lay my egg on the pollen she collected. Since my babies develop faster, they will emerge first to eat her egg and keep the rest of the pollen for itself.

Hi, I live most of my life alone but sometimes I like to be alone with others in my tribe. This is why you can find me nesting in huge aggregations with other bees like me. We all dig our own holes in the ground (like the one you see here) and collect our own pollen provisions, but we dig our nests a respectable couple of inches away from each other.

Hey everyone, I hope you can see my shiny strong mandibles in this tiny zoom box. I go by “carpenter bee” for short because I use my mandibles to dig my burrows in wood which is not easy! You’ve probably noticed me before and maybe confused me with Bombus over there. We are both big bees, but my abdomen is much shinier than Bombus.

Sorry I just woke up...I spend most of my time pollinating a very small group of plant species. When I’m not lounging out in cozy cactus flowers, I am making my nest in soil like Anthophora. However, our techniques are different. I make little chimneys around my nest entrance so that water and other predators can’t find my babies. I guess that’s why they call me a “chimney bee”.

Hi, I go by the “small carpenter bee” because I (like Xylocopa) nest in wood! I’ll usually take it easy and nest in some pithy stems or hollow twigs, I don’t need much room. I mostly lead a solitary life, but sometimes I’ll stick around to take care of my young instead of just leaving them to fend for themselves, like some bees on this call…

We are known as the “long horned bees” which you can see is a misleading name because my antennae aren’t super long! We pollinate important crops like sunflowers and other native plants in your garden. The males can be found cuddling together in flowers, known as “sleeping aggregation”. A  lot of male solitary bees do this because they can’t sleep in nests like females!

Hi, we are very social like Apis, but we don’t have quite as large of colonies and kinda start fresh every year. This means my Queen will start a new colony once a year and produce between 50-500 workers. The Queen releases a smell (or pheromone) that suppresses all of our ovaries so she can be the only one to reproduce. We also “buzz pollinate” which is a super efficient way of pollinating important crops like tomatoes, potatoes and peppers  just to name a few!

Hi all, I know I look more wasp-like than others because I don't need to be as fuzzy as my colleagues since I don’t collect pollen myself. Similar to Xeromelecta I’m a parasitic “cuckoo bee”, but I can parasitize many other bees, not only a specific group. My name is easy to remember because it is derived from the Greek word for “roaming” or “wandering” - which describes my life looking for bees to parasitize and never making a nest of my own.

Hi, I’m kinda busy right now because all these other males are trying to steal my territory. I’ve been hovering around this perfect flower patch all day to find the perfect female. I’ve had to chase off males and guard it fiercely. You can probably already see that I am easy to tell apart from the female Xylocopa because I have a white mask on my face, whereas the female’s face is all black.

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