![]() ![]() Founding queens of Halictus ligatus gather pollen and lay eggs that hatch into daughters, worker bees, destined to help with caring for the young and gathering food for the colony. The sweat bees we’re visiting this week adore cone flowers as a source of food, and both build nests in soil. Colonies are founded in spring by females, survivors of winter’s ravages. Some species like Agapostemon virescens adopt the solitary life style, while others like Halictus ligatus are eusocial (truly social) with queens producing non-reproductive daughters known as worker bees, tasked with foraging for nectar and pollen and tending the brood of their mothers. Unlike mason bees and plasterer bees we met in previous episodes, which are solitary with every female caring for her own young, halictid bees vary in their social structure. Guess this is why they are called sweat bees. These bees don’t sweat, but like sweat bees we visited at Bug of the Week some years ago, some halictids alight on humans and imbibe salt-rich perspiration. ![]() The name “sweat bee” is a little goofy and somewhat misleading. Bumble bees are usually the first arrivals in the morning, but shortly thereafter industrious bees, members of the halictid clan, arrive to collect nectar and pollen for youngsters in their colonies. Just after sunrise, the fragrance of cone flowers is delightful not only to humans, but also to a raft of pollinators. cone flower, renowned for its medicinal qualities as well as its beauty, is blooming at full throttle this week in gardens here in the DMV. ![]()
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