> Saturday I noticed one tiny insect acting rather like a bee, but it sure
> was tiny!  Can someone tell me what it is, more or less approximately?
> I can only describe it approximately!
>
> It seemed to be less than 1/8 (maybe under 1/16?) inch long, and I
> didn't have a magnifying glass handy, so I couldn't see much detail.
> It was visiting flowers of a Phacelia Bolanderi plant.  It would land
> on a stamen (!), and crawl around gathering pollen onto its legs.  It
> must have been doing this a while already, as it had collected quite a
> bit on its legs.  It seemed to gather most of the available pollen from
> its stamen, too.  Then it would take flight and dither around 2 or 3
> inches from the blossoms, and land on another flower stamen.  It
> departed after several minutes (I wasn't counting); I kept checking but
> didn't note another one.
 
Well, there are in fact several hundred bees that size native to
California, in several different families...BUT: the bees one tends to
find on Phacelia are very often specialized for that plant - it is, to
bee collectors like myself, one of the *best* plants to collect at, as
many of the bees are rare endemics and such. There is a very high
probability that the bee in question was an Andrenid bee in the genus
Perdita, one of the most diverse bee genera in the world, all of them
specialists to various degrees. If you see any more like it, catch a
few (they don't sting at all - if they're Perdita, that is - if
they're metallic green then they're more likely another family
entirely). I could identify it for you, also Dr. Terry Griswold at the
USDA/ARS Bee Lab in Logan, Utah might be interested. It could easily
be something rare (and probably highly endangered, though attempting
to prove that to anyone is 99% impossible - one of those cases where
it's abundant in part of the range of its host plant, and if the
habitat is destroyed, the bee goes extinct). It happens all the time,
but we probably won't know until *well* after the fact in most cases.
-------(please include "DY" in subj header of mail to this user)--------
Doug "Speaker-To-Insects" Yanega      "UT!"       Bitnet: KUENTO@UKANVAX
My card: 0 The Fool       (Snow Museum, Univ. of KS, Lawrence, KS 66045)
"Ev-ry-bo-dy loves the Michigan RAAAAaaaaag!" - The Singing Frog