Description
A leafcutter bee hanging underneath a pink bloom at Oaks Bottom with the entire underside of her abdomen packed solid with orange pollen. Not dusted. Packed.
That orange mass is her scopa, and where she carries it is the identifying feature of her whole family.
Between this photograph and the others in this collection you can now see all three of the pollen-carrying systems a bee might use, which is worth laying out side by side:
- The honeybee moistens pollen with nectar and packs it into a smooth bare basket on each hind leg — a tidy damp pellet that stays where it is put.
- The long-horned bee carries hers dry, tangled into a dense brush of hair on the hind legs.
- The leafcutter, here, carries hers dry on the underside of the abdomen — a whole belly given over to cargo.
The belly method is by far the untidiest of the three, and that turns out to be the point. Dry pollen held in loose hair on a surface that drags across every flower she lands on falls off constantly. She loses a great deal of what she gathers.
Losing pollen is pollination. Everything she drops on the next flower is the entire service the plant was paying for.
This is not a romantic observation, either — it is commercial. Leafcutter bees are farmed. Growers of alfalfa in particular manage them deliberately, in shelters full of drilled nesting tunnels, because on that crop a leafcutter simply outperforms a honeybee by a wide margin. The scruffy solitary bee that nobody has heard of does the job better than the famous one.
What happens to this load is worth picturing too. She will fly it back to a tunnel — a hollow stem, an old beetle hole, a gap in a wall — back in, and comb the pollen off her belly with her legs into a cell she has already lined with cut discs of leaf. Then a little nectar, one egg on top, a leaf lid, and on to the next cell. What you are looking at is one delivery on a long shift.
She will never meet the larva that eats it.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge in Portland, Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep. The orange against the pink bloom makes this the most colorful bee image in the collection.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3552 × 2592 pixels — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 11.5 × 8.5 inches at 300 DPI, and larger at normal wall viewing distances. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.
