Mr and Mrs

I'm back with the leaf cutter bees tonight - not least because they kept working today, when almost everything else had retreated to the shade, and thereby gave me the day's best photo opportunities.

The main image is a female Megachile willughbiella in a very typical pose. It always looks to me as though the nectar of Lathyrus latifolia is quite difficult to access, but that's not the reason she's bent in this way: a Megachile female will work even a flat-headed flower such as a thistle with her abdomen bent up, kicking pollen up onto her pollen brush as she scrabbles around the flower. I've often seen these bees holding their abdomens almost perpendicular to a flower head, which looks very strange indeed. They're highly efficient pollen collectors though, and when the brush is full and the entire underside of the abdomen is encrusted with pollen it can be difficult to identify them to species level, but in this case the light pollen dusting allows you to see that the scopa is two-tone, with orange hair at the base of the abdomen giving way to black at the tip.

There's an almost constant patrol of male Megachile willughbiella cruising around the perennial pea at the moment, looking for unmated females and trying their luck with anything they come across of approximately the right size and appearance. I don't often see them feeding from this plant though - there's a hebe nearby which they seem to prefer - so I was surprised to find that I'd caught one among today's photos. If you look at the extra you'll see that he's smaller and less bulky than the female, with a squarer abdomen that lacks a pollen brush. His forelegs, with those hairy expanded white tarsi, and orange under-surfaces to the femora, are distinctive.