Aussie Bee Gallery
Aussie Bee Gallery
Aussie Bee Gallery
Photograph Gallery
The Domino Cuckoo Bee (Thyreus lugubris) sipping honey from a feeder during a native bee experiment.
The dramatically coloured polka-dot cuckoo bees sneak into the nests of blue banded bees and teddy bear
bees and lay their eggs inside the nests.
Two blue banded bees, sleeping nose to nose, in a greenhouse tomato experiment. One bee has been marked with
a dab of non-toxic pink paint so that the researchers could follow her activities inside the greenhouse.
A teddy bear bee (Amegilla) taking a rest from her foraging by grasping a stem with her jaws.
Teddy bear bees build tiny solitary nests in burrows in the ground.
Like the blue banded bees, teddy bear bees can also gather pollen by buzz pollinating flowers.
Here a teddy bear bee buzz pollinates a Solanum flower.
This tiny masked bee is one of the hundreds of solitary bees in the family Colletidae.
They nest in pre-existing holes in timber.
The hole that this masked bee has adopted was used last season by a solitary native wasp
which had sealed the entrance of the hole with cream coloured mud.
Now this masked bee has taken over the vacated wasp nest for her own home.
Resin bees (Megachile) also nest in pre-existing holes in timber. This bee is sealing the front entrance of her
nest with resin mixed with some chewed up leaves. Aussie Bee has made many artificial nest sites for these
bees by drilling holes in blocks of timber and the local resin bees use them enthusiastically.
This is a group of worker bees on the brood comb of an Austroplebeia australis stingless bee nest.
They are surrounding their queen bee with her large abdomen swollen with eggs.
Austroplebeia bees do not enclose their brood chamber with as many resinous layers as the Trigona bees do.
So it is easier to observe the fascinating behaviour of the queen as she lays her eggs.