this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
This is the most successful thing ever!
this is dawson’s burrowing bee! they are one of the largest bees in australia and they burrow into the ground to make nests. males are so aggressive that they will literally fight and kill each other to get a female! and if a particularly aggressive male does not get a female he will murder all of the other males out of rage! (and sometimes the females will be casualties of these brawls – here is a video of a bee brawl where a female get decapitated. these bees are very large and kind of look like half bee half cockroach. but the females’s fuzzy white heads are pretty cute! [photo credit]
and dark bee tumblr comes through for us again… we are so fortunate. thank u dark bee tumblr. thank u
I’m mad that they missed the opportunity to use “les-bee-ans”
This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.
This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.
These are green sweat bees- they burrow in the ground and live in apartment complexes, where they all use the same entrance but then have their own separate burrows rather than one large room. Some have kids, some don’t, so someone’s always around to keep out invaders. Unlike most bees the males actually do quite a bit of pollinating and go out in groups.
dark bee tumblr has graced us once again with even more forbidden and secret bees we are truly blessed
Fun fact: that valley carpenter bee (that big golden one; Xylocopa varipuncta) is the male. The females are all black. The males do this thing where they just… hover… looking for females. They’ll just cruise around a likely spot checking everything out to see if it’s a female they can mate with. They don’t sting (though the females can).
Now working to banish the thought that came into my head when I imagined a big, golden-colored male organism obsessed with females and basically just hovering looking for its next mating opportunity.
