Diario de little_mousie

Ever since I recorded Priocnemis oregona going down the bee hole and @beespeaker asked about how big was it, I've been thinking about putting a scale in the shot when I record Video to help constrain the size of the subject in the image. This afternoon I noticed a sweet little Furrow Bee smiling up at me from her front porch, getting ready to go for a fly about. I decided to have a go at measuring the bee in the video.

https://youtu.be/r84P5nhXEdI

Watch around the 4cm mark for the antenna to start wiggling.

I read allot of diverse topics. Memory maps and "Bug Vision" both fascinate me. Some time last week +/- I read:

Object Recognition in Flight: How Do Bees Distinguish between 3D Shapes?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4757030/?report=classic

It had not occurred to me that I might be setting up a demonstration of the concepts in the document. Watch how the bee's first order of business is making a 3D memory map of my ruler.

There has been a good bit of agricultural disturbance in both of the large bee aggregation sites here in the housing development. The lower Hay field got mowed last week. I went down to look around to see if there is any new bee activity since the mowing but found none. It may sound crazy that I looked and commented but up here among the houses there is new nesting activity in areas scraped by the grader blade and or front loader bucket in less than a week after the equipment is done.

Yesterday I went out to where the closer and largest bee aggregation is to find out who was building new nests now. The landscape crew put in a new planting next to the road disturbing the ground where the bees nest. I'm fascinated by both how soon after the disturbance the bees move into the disturbed areas and the succession of species living next door to each other in the same ground. As the April Andrena were finishing the last of their brood cells the June Andrena a much smaller species was moving into abandoned but open nest holes formerly used by the April Andrena as well as excavating new holes of their own.

Ref: https://youtu.be/UI_AtzngE1o
Drag the progress bar to the 8 minute mark and hit play You will see Little Bee poking its head out briefly as Big Bee begins coming out of her nest. Both Bees are different species of Andrena

Now we have Eusocial Furrow Bees nesting in the same ground the other two species were in earlier. This video is much longer. 30 minutes is the size limit set by my camera and I posted the hole thing. I'm still working on the log of arrivals, departures and bee heads peeking out of the hole from each off the 3 nests in the image, the log is in the bottom link. I'm using the log to try and figure out the minimum number of bees living in each hole.

https://youtu.be/ImCWy65CX18

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mzDPgd5zFmouRtsYhx0fcOTzD-MCGg6-alqpxTGULZg/edit?usp=sharing

@beespeaker @wenatcheeb @augustjackson

When ever I hear or read about parasitic wasps they talk about the wasp stinging the victim and carrying it back to their nest where they lay an egg on it. I won't say they are wrong or any thing but it seems that there are other answers available.

For the past few days I've been watching a wasp out of the corner of my eye as I was making my nest recordings. It looks like she starts digging up a nest hole to catch a bee but then gives up early and moves on only to repeat the process again and again. Today when I was setting up my camera I was close enough to see the answer. The wasp is egging the bees nest. What looked like digging was knocking the egg down the bee hole mixed in with some dirt.

Much less work than catching and dragging victims home to the kids.

Here is the video
https://youtu.be/sZBI96HhiYc

If you read the description you can drag the progress bar to the segment you want to see. The first time listed on a line marks where the activity starts and the second when the subject leaves the field of view