Non-honey bees (Justyna Kierat)

Most of cuckoo bees sneak into the nests of other bee species when the owner bee is out collecting food, or open nests that have already been closed and are unguarded, and lay their own eggs there. But there are also other strategies... nonhoneybees.com/2025/08/13/s...

It's time for mating balls. Fascinating clumps of male solitary bees, with a female (so I assume) somewhere inside.
nonhoneybees.com/2025/03/30/m...

Sharp-tailed bees (genus Coelioxys) owe their common name to the shape of the ending of the abdomen. In females, the abdomen usually ends in narrow, sharp spine. But it’s not always the case.
nonhoneybees.com/2024/12/02/s...

Bumblebee queens emerge from their natal nests in summer, then almost immediately mate and seek for overwintering place. When they emerge next spring, they are alone – their mother, sisters and brothers didn’t survive winter. How might they feel about that?

Bumblebees are known for their “buzzing” behaviour – they vibrate some plants, like tomato, to effectively release pollen from poricidal anthers. (They are not the only bees which can do buzz pollination, though.)

Beautiful! This is not the buff tailed bumblebee but male of one of the cuckoo bumblebees, most likely Bombus vestalis.

Featuring: Nomioides minutissimus and Megachile parietina. I also hope you recognize the Biblical reference 😉

Today is a good day for a story about love.Some orchid species use males of bees or other insects as pollinators, making them think that their flowers are females ready to mate.
nonhoneybees.com/2024/02/14/h...

I just came across such a sentence in a book “Bees of Costa Rica” by P. Hanson et al.: “(…)some species of Partamona and Trigona are highly aggressive toward stimuli close to their colony and will attack humans by entangling themselves in hair and biting”.
Read more: nonhoneybees.com/2025/02/07/e...

Bees from the genus Anthidium use hairs scratched from the surface of some plants to line their nests. Female shapes the collected hairs into a woolly ball and returns with it to her nest.

Nomioides is one of the smallest bee genera in Europe. Nomioides minutissimus, the only Polish species of this genus, is just 3-5 mm long. It is on my profile picture.