Description
A female long-horned bee working a pale aster at Oaks Bottom in August, one hind leg already carrying a bright yellow load of pollen. Grey-brown fuzz across the thorax, pale banding on the abdomen, and her whole attention on the flower.
She does not have long horns. That is the first thing to say about her.
The name belongs to the males of the genus Melissodes, whose antennae are absurdly long — in some species running nearly the length of the body, sweeping back over the abdomen like something borrowed from a much larger insect. Females get sensible antennae and something else entirely instead.
They get the legs. Look at the hind leg carrying that pollen. A female long-horn has a scopa — a dense brush of long hairs on the hind leg — and when it is loaded she appears to be wearing shaggy yellow chaps. It is one of the most distinctive pollen loads of any bee here.
And it works quite differently from a honeybee’s. A honeybee moistens her pollen and packs it into a smooth bare basket on the leg, a tidy pellet that stays put. This one carries hers dry, loose, tangled in hair. Which means she sheds it constantly, all over every flower she visits. The messy method loses far more pollen — and losing pollen is precisely what pollination is. She is the better pollinator for being worse at carrying.
The flower is not incidental either. Long-horned bees are largely specialists on the aster family — asters, sunflowers, coneflowers, goldenrod — and their whole flight season is timed to it. They emerge in mid to late summer, when those flowers open, and are gone by autumn. A mason bee in April and a long-horn in August are not competing; they are working different halves of the year.
She is a solitary ground nester. No hive, no queen, no honey. She digs a burrow in bare soil, provisions each cell with a loaf of pollen and nectar, lays a single egg on it, seals it, and does it again. Everything she gathers on this aster is groceries for a larva she will never meet.
One last thing worth going out for, if you like a strange sight. Male long-horns often sleep out in the open, clamped to a flower stem by their jaws, sometimes several of them lined up on the same stalk. Go at dusk or first light and you can find a little row of them hanging there asleep, antennae and all. It is a photograph almost nobody has.
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.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3360 × 3008 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.
