First Spring Hymenoptera

It's a bee. 

Update: it is a Small Carpenter Bee (Genus Ceratina).

When Lucy and I went outside to check our daffodils yesterday, I noticed an insect or two crawling in this bloom. It's a bee! My instinct, such as it is, says it is a masked bee (see cropped version below), but they are not documented to be out this early. Nomad bees are out this early, though, so it may be that. I gave a masked bee identification to iNaturalist, though, because the bee people have been swarming all over bee photos all winter making sure that IDs are correct. They will come across this and if it is wrong, they will quickly correct it.

Masked bee or nomad?
Both are native.

Last week I sat outside at the school's picnic table and beheld a cold fly trying to warm itself in the sun. The antennae are wrong for the order Diptera (flies), as were the head, eyes and wings. The venation and the antennal flagellomeres led me to the order Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, and ants), which led me to sawflies, which led me to the Family Tenthredinidae — Common Sawflies. I checked the Vermont phenology for sawflies and have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that this is a male Dolerus unicolor. No one on iNat pays too much attention to sawflies, though, so I don't know when I will be affirmed—if I ever am. And that's a shame. Sawflies have become one of my favorite families. 

Perhaps Dolerus unicolor

That is Spring in northern Vermont as of this date. But where there is one bug there are thousands more! We made it through the winter.

😂

Photo Sunday

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Wordless Wednesday: Caught in Flight

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Some Random Shots of Summer

One of our day lilies

I am fascinated by the stigma

A geometer moth

Another, different, brown geometer moth

Bumblebee on red clover

Five-toed raccoon track and tiny, round Zorro the Cat
tracks in the mud after a flash flood.

Dwarf zinnia that Ironman successfully planted

They bloomed continuously until the first heavy frost in September.

A Carolina grasshopper

Yellow woolly bear caterpillar

An unidentified warbler

Question Mark Butterfly

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Honey Tree (The Orchard)

I finished reading a book yesterday — The Orchard: A Memoir. Adele Crockett Robertson wrote about the three years she farmed the family apple orchard in eastern Massachusetts during the Depression. It is a wonderful book — quiet, sad, and very New England. Robertson devotes a lot of pages to bees because bees are vitally important for growing apples. I find myself continually thinking about Robertson since I have finished the book.

On the left is a honey tree in Sutton, New Hampshire, that I photographed this past summer. This is a tall white pine tree. You can see the hive on the left side of the tree at a fair distance off the ground. With my long 250mm lens I was able to get some decent shots. If I weren’t allergic to bee stings, I would’ve tried harder for better close ups!

 

In the photo above, I am a bit closer. I could hear the buzzing of the thousands of bees. It was a calm buzzing, as if they were very busy and not alarmed. Below I have a cropped photo of the entrance to the hive. You can see the bees going in with pollen and you can see the worker bees working around the entrance to the hive.

Below, I tried a closer crop in order to see as much detail as possible. I think, but I may be wrong, that I see other dead insects that the worker bees are dealing with.

I not only think about Robertson frequently the past few days — I also wonder about how this hive is doing now that winter is coming. Have all of the worker bees died as Robertson describes? Will the weather turn so cold for so long that the remaining bees won’t be able to get out and relieve themselves and, therefore, survive?

You can read Robertson’s bee stories by clicking on the link here: http://www.amazon.com/Orc... When the page is loaded, search inside the book for “that first year.” You will then see a link for page 28. Click on that link and read the next two chapters. Then buy the book. If you buy it by clicking on the ad below, I get very small commission. I only recommend those books that I feel are worth reading. Think of my photographs when you read the chapters about bees. Wonder, like me, about how they are doing this winter.

My Honey Tree Set on Flickr

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