Apoidea

The day before yesterday, I identified a Halictus parallelus from WI. This is a social bee, though it lives in small colonies, not the metropolis hives of Apis, the honeybee. A lifelong beekeeper tells me that the reason Apis is getting so many diseases is that it never evolved to stay in the same place for year after year. Apis swarms at the drop of a feather in summer, and yesterday, Mr. Beekeeper was pulling a swarm off the cyclone fence. It escaped, a rare thing nowadays, feral bee colonies. My Halictus queen never got to found one. Sandy country out there in WI where I caught her, and hopefully her distant realatives are doing well. Six or eight workers, maybe more by now. It will all be over in August or Sept, the whole set of workers having spent their lives to produce a dozen or more queens and a similar number of males. Sand, not wax. Tunnels, not hives.
In my garden, Agapostemon viriscens, on my sunflower, and Megachile georgica. The first a beautiful green halictid bee, like halictus, but only quasisocial. They share nests as an incidental effect of their construction activities, and tolerate each other, but do not truly cooperate. I see big females and smaller ones though, a big one was foraging earlier this year, and I am beginning to conclude that this species leans toward eusociality. I read that eusociality, queens and workers, evolved over and over, and has been lost as many times, in that family, the halictids. Tattoo on my arm reads...I serve no queen. Entomology joke. Speaking of kinky, Megachile georgica practices bondage. The males have enlarged tibia to block the female's vision during mating. Another Megachile, Ashmeidella, very tiny, ID'd my first one only recently. Also, a strange parasite, probly torymid, from a trap nest I set out behind the greehouse. How the thing found a host, in Chicago, amid such uncertain surroundings, I cannot comprehend.