#septembee — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #septembee, aggregated by home.social.
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That's a wrap for #SeptemBee! This month I painted 28 species of bees, 1 isopod, and 1 landscape (not pictured), each relating to the daily #SciArtSeptember prompt (which I was able to stick to far more easily than anticipated!)
I hope you enjoyed learning about bees! I'm off to hibernate until next year :) -
Last day of #SeptemBee! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "dream" I've picked a bee famous for how it sleeps. Amegilla cingulata, the blue banded bee, is frequently pictured asleep, legs curled and clinging to a twig by its mandibles. Though it almost exclusively prefers blue flowers, it has become an important pollinator in Australia due to its method of buzz pollination.
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#SeptemBee 29th #SciArtSeptember prompt "foresight."
This is Bombus terrestris, the buff tailed bumblebee. As one of Europe's most common bees, it is also a frequent subject of behavior and intelligence studies, and it turns out bees can be pretty smart. They communicate by dancing, can learn and remember maps and faces, they show signs of PTSD if you harass them too much, and yes, even show signs of foresight.
B. terrestris, for example, continuously monitors its nest's honey and pollen reserves. If it gets too low, they will start biting and chewing the leaf buds off tomato plants. This damage induces the plant to start flowering and provide more nectar and pollen for the hive.
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#SeptemBee 28th! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt "harvest" I've chosen a squash bee, Peponapis pruinosa, although there are lots of bees colloquially called "squash bees."
Do yourself a favor: look inside a big orange squash/pumpkin flower one morning and say hi to your new best friend. Squash bees have been quietly following humans and their crops around North America (and beyond) for thousands of years. They may spend their entire lives in a single field, pollinating only cucurbits. As solitary ground nesters, no-till methods are vital for preserving their habitat and their continuing pollination services.
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#SeptemBee 27th! The #SciArtSeptember theme is "bound" so I chose a geographically restricted species, Xylocopa darwini. These carpenter bees are the only bees native to the Galapagos Islands - up until relatively recently, they were the only bees there at all!
You get two today because I love the sexual dimorphism in the species. They look suspiciously like the valley carpenter bee (X. sonorina) that I painted for Valentine's Day earlier this year. Perhaps some lost queen got blown over the ocean a long long time ago and landed on an island full of tortoises.
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#SeptemBee 26th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme "foraging" I've chosen the alfalfa leafcutter bee, Megachile rotundata.
Alfalfa is one of the most important forage crops around the world. The flowers have a trap mechanism that is triggered when a bee lands on its keel petal. The flower whomps the bee on the head with its spring-loaded pistils, depositing pollen as it probes around for nectar. Honey bees don't like getting hit in the head and will chew through the petals to bypass the trap, but M. rotundata don't care at all!
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#SeptemBee the 25th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme of tireless I've chosen one of the few (known) nocturnal bees, Megalopta genalis. These Central American sweat bees have absolutely enormous eyes, which are specially adapted for the polarized light of dawn and dusk. Many of its favored flowers open at sunset.
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#SeptemBee 24th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme of "numbered" I've chosen the blue calamintha bee, Osmia calaminthae. These bees are very hard to find, having only been observed at 11 sites within a narrow range of sandy Florida scrub since they were first described in 2011. They are specialists of the calamintha plant for which they are named.
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#SeptemBee the 23rd! The #SciArtSeptember theme is "scouting" so I chose another eusocial honey bee, the red dwarf honey bee (Apis florea). When swarming in search of a new home, scout bees will dance to let their fellow hive mates know of a suitable location. Unlike western honey bees, however, this dwarf bee's dance includes tiny squeaking sounds! The more excited the chatter, the more likely the bees are to pick that scout's location.
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#SeptemBee 22 - Happy Autumn!
The #SciArtSeptember theme is "Fellowship" as in "of the Ring" and fun fact! Did you know that of the over 200 taxa named for Tolkien and his works - including dozens of moths, and six recently discovered wasps mostly named for hobbits in the genus "Shireplitis" - there's only one bee?
And this one's a fellowship destroyer - Austrosphecodes balrog, or as I like to call it, the Balrog bee.
Are its wings real? Are they metaphorical? We may never know, but we do know that these cuckoo bees are aggressive brood parasites, often attacking solitary bees before laying eggs in their nests. I can imagine a big hairy Gandalf bee at the entrance shouting "You Shall Not Pass!"
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#SeptemBee day 20! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "glacial" I chose an arctic bumblebee, Bombus mixtus; commonly found in mountain meadows, forests, and tundra habitats. They are known to nest and forage at elevations over 12,000 feet!
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#SeptemBee 19th - for #SciArtSeptember I went with "height" instead of "depth" and picked the Himalayan giant honey bee, Apis laboriosa. These guys build comb nests high up on sheer cliff faces, but that doesn't stop people from climbing up there on rope ladders to get at the honey!
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#SeptemBee the 18th! I've painted a pebble bee, Dianthidium floridiense, which vaguely relates to the #SciArtSeptember theme of "cenote" because... rocks?
Pebble bees use plant resin to build their nests out of - you guessed it, pebbles! - cementing the masses to branches or stone walls.
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#SeptemBee 17th. For the #SciArtSeptember theme of "trawl" I've picked ... an oil-digging bee, Centris rhodopus, because ocean trawling and digging for oil are both bad for the environment, right? ;)
These bees aren't bad for the environment, but they are known for collecting oils from plants instead of pollen. They often live in deserts and can tolerate higher temperatures than most bees - maybe it's easier to work with oils then?
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#SeptemBee the 16th! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "rift" I've painted a cliff mason bee, Osmia xanthomelana. These bees build nests on eroded cliff faces and in loose soil. They dig out a small cavern then construct individual brood cells out of mud, provisioning them with pollen from bird's foot trefoil for their larvae.
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#SeptemBee 15th - halfway there! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of spawning, I've painted a silver digger bee, Habropoda miserabilis, which are known for their mating behaviors. Males emerge first in the spring, then wait around the entrances for the females to emerge. Because females only mate once, it becomes a race to get there first, often resulting in large, squirming balls of horny males surrounding the female and fighting to get on top.
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#SeptemBee 14th. For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "mimic" I've painted a bee who looks suspiciously like a wasp. Nomada edwardsii are brood parasites; females lay their eggs in already prepared cells from other bees. After hatching, the nomad bee larva first eats its host larva, then all its nectar and pollen provisions.
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#SeptemBee the 13th. For the #SciArtSeptember theme of bottleneck I've chosen a likely extinct species of cuckoo bumblebee, Bombus variabilis. Cuckoo bumblebees are social parasites that are incapable of collecting pollen or producing a worker caste. They take over extant nests by killing the queen and exploiting the unrelated workers, forcing them to care for her and her brood.
As a parasitic species, these guys are dependent on the success of its host; in this case, B. pensylvanicus, which is also declining throughout its native range. As a result, the variable cuckoo bee hasn't been seen in over twenty years, and may very well be extinct.
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#SeptemBee 12th. The #SciArtSeptember theme is "wandering", so I've chosen the most widespread of bees, the western honey bee (Apis mellifera). Thanks to people, these guys can be found on nearly every continent... For better or for worse. As an invasive species, honey bees displace native bees and reduce biodiversity. Someone in my neighborhood started beekeeping this summer, and the local bees have nearly disappeared.
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#SeptemBee 11th. The #SciArtSeptember prompt is "venomous." Most bees are venomous so I went with a non-venomous stingless bee, the vulture bee!
Subject of dozens of YouTube videos of dubious scientific integrity and a Wikipedia article that reads like some entomologist sat through all those videos so you don't have to, the vulture bee is one of the world's sweetest, potentially misunderstood scavengers. Well, three of, because there are three known species, all in the genus Trigona.
These are the only bees known to eat meat, having developed a specialized gut biome that can handle its digestion. They have been observed scavenging from rotting fish, birds, mammals, and other invertebrates. The meat is brought back to the hive in various forms, replacing pollen as a primary protein source for developing larvae.
It seems very important to the editor of the Wikipedia page that we understand that vulture bees *do not* make "meat honey." One species mixes partially digested meat paste with non-floral plant-based sugars (*not* honey), another produces a protein-rich secretion (like royal jelly) that it feeds to its larvae separately from the honey-like substance it also makes.
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#SeptemBee the tenth: for the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "tawny" I've painted the tawny mining bee. I don't have any fun facts about these tree lovers, I just think they're neat :)
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#SeptemBee the ninth! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt "vanishing" I've painted the xunán kab (Melipona beecheii), a stingless bee from Central America. The Mayas have been managing these bees for thousands of years; considered sacred for their (potentially psychoactive) honey, it was a job originally reserved for priests. The bees have nearly vanished from the wild due to habitat loss, pesticides, and competition with invasive honey bees, but Mayan beekeepers are still working to keep the managed hives alive with traditional methods.
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#SeptemBee 8th - for the #SciArtSeptember prompt "niche" I painted one of my favorite specialist pollinators, Andrena astragali; the only known bees capable of consuming pollen from highly toxic death camas flowers.
Death camas grows all over my yard in the springtime, but the only bug I've seen on it is this grubby little guy (no clue).
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Happy #SeptemBee 7th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme I've chosen the northern amber bumblebee, Bombus borealis, commonly found in northern North America. As one of at least half a dozen "mostly yellow, blacked tailed" bumblebees, they are a good example of why identifying bumblebees based on color patterning can be tricky. Knowing the location can help, but this guy's range overlaps with B. fervidus, whose distinguishing feature is a slightly narrower black band on the thorax. Some other bumblebee species have so much variety in their coloration it can be hard to tell they're the same species!