Blue Banded Bees visit

The blue-banded bee is an Australian native bee that has recently begun visiting my garden.

They use a process called "buzz pollination " that involves clinging onto flowers by clamping their legs onto the anther of the flower and contracting their flight muscles so vigorously that the pollen is released. This type of pollination is really useful on crops such as tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries, kiwi fruit, eggplants and chillies. I took this photo of this bee about to buzz one of my hollyhocks.

Blue-banded bees can sting, but are not as aggressive as other bees and are solitary creatures.  Female Blue-banded bees tend to nest in burrows in dried-up river banks, old clay homes, and mortar between bricks, but may also burrow in soft sandstone. We have lots of this type of rock and it can become riddled with bee tunnels. Males don’t build nests, they cling to plant stems to roost for the night.

In Australia the majority of these bees collect their nectar from blue flowers, but they also feed on some non-blue flowers such as the white salvia, tomato and eggplant flowers. They also like my fuschia flowers.

Adult blue banded bees fly only in warm months of the year (October to April) and die before the winter. Immature bees remain sealed in their cells inside the nests during the winter. They develop into adults and emerge when the warm weather returns. Cells at the end contain an egg and food (pollen and nectar) for the larvae when it emerges.