Description
A female long-horned bee — genus Melissodes — head-down in the disc florets of a Douglas aster at Oaks Bottom. This one was lit with off-camera flash, which is why the pale hair bands, the green striped eye and the individual hairs on her hind leg all hold detail that afternoon shade simply will not give you.
Here is what I did not understand about these bees until I spent an afternoon with them: she is solitary, but she is almost certainly not alone.
Melissodes females each dig and stock their own burrow — no colony, no queen, no workers, nobody to cover a shift. But they frequently nest in aggregations, sometimes hundreds of separate burrows packed into one patch of bare ground, each one excavated by a different female working entirely for herself. From above it looks like a colony. It is nothing of the kind. It is a neighborhood.
Every female in it is running the same impossible schedule: dig a burrow, provision a cell with a loaf of pollen and nectar, lay a single egg, seal it, start the next one — and finish an entire generation before the asters stop blooming.
Which is why she moves the way she does. Watch a patch of Douglas aster in August and the females never pause. They are on a deadline measured in weeks, and every grain on that leg is one trip closer to a larva she will never meet.
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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.