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alfalfa leafcutting bees (Megachile rotundata)

Published at 1732 × 1436 in How One Entomologist Learned to Appreciate the Little Things (Microbes) in Life

Closeup of two bees perched on the center of a daisy flower. The bees are mostly dark in color except for light brown hairs on the side of their thoraxes and stripes on their abdomens. The center disk of the flower is green with small yellow flowers arising from the outer rows, and ringed with long light purple petals extending outward from the edge.

During his Ph.D. work at the University of California, Riverside, Jake Cecala, Ph.D., conducted a project looking at the effects of irrigation and pesticide use in ornamental plants on solitary bee reproduction. Shown here are male and female alfalfa leafcutting bees (Megachile rotundata) on a flower of seaside daisy (Erigeron glaucus), a California native plant often grown as an ornamental.

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