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Osmia taurus

a fuzzy bee, yellowish-brown in color, perches vertically on a grass blade next to the edge of a piece of corrugated plastic sheet, which is blue-ish green in color.

In a new review article published in February in Environmental Entomology, Grace Gutierrez and Margarita Margarita López-Uribe, Ph.D., of Penn State University and colleagues at Cornell University and the University of Virginia investigated the ecology of the mason bee Osmia taurus (shown here) in the U.S. The species’ home range is in eastern Asia, and it was first discovered in the U.S. in 2002. Gutierrez and colleagues examined if O. taurus qualifies as an invasive species and compared its expansion in North America with that of another non-native mason bee, Osmia cornifrons, which was purposefully introduced in the U.S. in 1978 to facilitate pollination in orchards. (Photo by T’ai Roulston, Ph.D.)

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