I stepped outside onto the roof the other day and discovered a remarkably iridescent blue bee hanging out on the ‘Centennial’ kumquat tree. At first I thought it might be one of the 2000 bees in The Halictidae Family. But it’s so blue, turquoise even! Can they be blue as well as shades of green?
Then I started to wonder if it is a bee at all. I’m still not very good about discerning a hornet from a bee. Or perhaps it’s an alien. They’re already here among us, just very tiny. This perspective is most likely reinforced by watching Alien and Aliens back-to-back recently.
I’ve looked around online and in the insect books on my shelf searching for identification but have come up short. I’ve never seen anything like it!
Minutes later a large dragonfly hovered around me. Some days my garden in the sky is more wild kingdom than the one on the ground.
Maybe a cuckoo wasp? This photo looks similar, taken in Eastern US.
http://bugguide.net/node/view/53259
Beautiful wasp! I am no expert but I have heard that usually such brilliantly coloured wasps are parasitic. They lay their eggs in dead or rotting meat. Could it be the cuckoo wasp as these links suggest?
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2007/06/01/more-beautiful-bees-chrysididae/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goudwesp_collage.jpg
http://bugguide.net/node/view/6946/bgimage
Wow, that is an amazing colour! It sure does look like a kind of bee, I wonder what kind? It’d be really helpful to have an entomologist friend handy for these kinds of things. I often find myself wondering “all those years in university, and I never made ONE entomologist buddy…”.
… and/or have the dragonflies been bonking the bees?
I have these around my house too! I live in PA. They look like bees…but land and act like flies. They are the most beautiful colors!
I never leave comments, but I get your blog in my reader and knew your wasp. It’s a cuckoo wasp (family Chrysididae). They are so beautiful, also, they don’t sting.
cuckoo wasp maybe? i’m no bug guru, but maybe…
Halictids certainly can be blue! I can’t say for sure by eye-ball what it is (Oh! The years of entomology is slowly eroding) but it’s a good guess to say it IS in the Halictidae.
As for the whole hornet/bee/wasp thing, they’re all Hymenoptera (as are ants -which are technically wingless social wasps) and I don’t know any sure-fire way of saying which are which other than a general sense that bees are more robust while wasps/hornets are more slender… usually :P
Some bees are social, some are solitary, some wasps are social, some are solitary so a hive/colony isn’t any good indicator, either.
So, my thoughts are a definitive MAYBE.
Yes! It does look like a cuckoo wasp. Thanks so much! Another new thing learned.
I’ve no idea what it is, but it sure is pretty!
I have an Exquisite Creatures: Insect Art calendar by Christopher Marley and it happens to look like July’s photo of the Borneo Wasp.
Very cool, I want one!
What type of lens did you use for this shot?