Observation of the Week , 10/13/16
This Thyreus cuckoo bee seen in South Korea by @whaichi is our Observation of the Week!
An American who’s been teaching English in South Korea since 2007, Paul Bailey has been using iNat to document the organisms he sees on along a river during his walk to and from work. And after nearly a year of using iNat he’s recently met up with Kim Hyun-tae (@pintail) a few times to look for frogs, salamanders (including the endemic species Karsenia koreana), snakes, and other animals, and says that on their first trip, Mr. Kim “heard about my interest in insects he gave me one of his old macro lenses which I used to take that photo of the Thyreus. so without his help that photo may not have been possible!”
Armed with this lens, he says “I walked further south than usual along the river one afternoon and noticed a large cluster of fleabanes that I wanted to check out for pollinators. As I drew closer I noticed a moving patch of blue, but it was too far away to see clearly and it eventually disappeared into the nearby vegetation...I noticed the patch of blue coming back and it turned out to be a bright blue bee that landed quite close to me on one of the fleabanes.
[With the new lens] I was...worried that I wouldn't end up with any decent pictures so I snapped more than 80 photos while I had the opportunity. And honestly, I did also enjoy watching it buzz around the flowers so it wasn't really a bad way to pass the time.”
Bees in the genus Thyreus are some of the several thousand species of bees known as “cuckoo bees,” which are brood parasites - named after the famous Cuckoo birds. Like other brood parasites, female cuckoo bees don’t actually care for or provision for their young - they instead make other animals do it. In most solitary bee species, a female leaves a provision of nectar and pollen with their egg (or eggs). Once the egg hatches, the larva will eat the provisioned food then pupate into its adult form. A female cuckoo bee, however, lays its egg in the nest of other bee species, and when the cuckoo bee egg hatches the larva eats the provisioned food and will often kill and eat the host larva as well! Due to this fascinating life cycle, a female cuckoo bee doesn’t have scopa, or anatomical structures for collecting pollen, on her body.
Paul’s current interest in nature traces back to an introductory entomology course he took in college, where he “ended up with a pet tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta), a pair of Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa), and a collection of silkworms (Bombyx mori) that I raised on behalf of the entomology department.” So it’s not a surprise he’s found some fantastic insects while in South Korea.
Using iNaturalist “[has] been a great way for me to learn more about the more detailed differences between members of the same Order or Family,” says Paul. “I no longer lump all butterflies together, for example, and now start thinking of them as 'Blues', 'Skippers', 'Brushfoots', etc.” And in addition to documenting the wildlife around his residence, Paul says “I've found myself looking for something to record every time I take a trip to another part of Korea, sort of as a 'wildlife souvenir' of the journey...I haven't made any travel plans based on someone else's observations yet, but it might happen before too long!”
- by Tony Iwane
- Here’s some footage of a Thyreus bee getting some nectar. Check out the colors!
- @pintail started a Korean Nature project on iNat, you can find it here. There are more than 13,000 observations in it.
- Blue is not a common color in nature, one reason being that many animals can’t make blue pigments. Instead, many blue animals get their color by creating materials whose structure reflects blue light. NPR has a nice article about this phenomenon.
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