Description
A leafcutter bee from directly above at Oaks Bottom, wings spread wide and flat, abdomen banded in pale hair. This is very close to the view an entomologist would arrange a specimen into, except that she is alive and about to leave.
Which makes it a good chance to settle something people get wrong constantly. Count the wings.
There are four. A large forewing and a smaller hindwing on each side, spread apart here where normally you would never see the join. Every bee and every wasp has four — the order name, Hymenoptera, means membrane wing. Anything hovering over your flowers with only two wings is a fly wearing a bee costume.
And here is the part that is genuinely lovely. In flight, four separate wings would be a mess — they would interfere with each other and waste energy. So bees do not fly with four wings. They fly with two.
Along the leading edge of each hindwing runs a row of tiny hooks called hamuli. When she opens up to fly, those hooks catch a folded ridge on the trailing edge of the forewing and zip the two together into a single continuous airfoil. On landing they unhook and the wings fold away separately. It is a mechanical fastener, evolved, on an insect the size of your thumbnail — and depending on the species there may be as few as a dozen hooks or well over twenty doing the job.
In this frame they are unzipped. That is why you can see four.
The other thing worth knowing about her is what she does to your garden, because people usually meet the evidence before they meet the bee.
If your roses or lilacs have neat semicircular notches cut from the leaf edges — so tidy they look done with a hole punch — that is her. She cuts those discs out with her jaws, flies them home, and uses them to build and seal the cells in her nest tunnel, wrapping each one around a loaf of pollen and a single egg like a small green parcel.
It does the plant essentially no harm. The leaf keeps working, the shrub does not care, and in exchange you are hosting one of the more efficient pollinators in the garden. If you find those notches, the correct response is to leave them alone and feel rather pleased.
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 symmetry of the spread wings makes this the most graphic bee image in the collection.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3328 × 3072 pixels — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 11 × 10 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.