Dear Readers, you might remember that during a ten-minute break from my revision yesterday I noticed a most unusual bee on my lavender. And to my delight, it’s turned out to be a new species – a Fork-tailed Flower Bee (Anthophora furcata). I should have guessed from the yellow face that this might be related to my old favourite, the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes).

There are a couple of unusual things about this little bee. Firstly, unlike the rest of her family, she is an aerial nester, which means that she’ll make tunnels in dead wood where she’ll lay and provision her eggs. In cases like this, the female eggs are laid first, at the deepest part of the twig or tunnel, with the males laid at the end, so that the boys will emerge first and be ready when the females come out. How the mother bee knows this is anybody’s guess. My bee is definitely a male, as they’re the only ones with the yellow face.

These bees have a great fondness for plants in the Lamium family (such as deadnettle and hedge woundwort), and are also often seen in wetlands, so although this bee is at the front of the house I am wondering if it’s the pond that’s encouraged him. Apparently the females have hairy faces, which they used in order to collect pollen, and in fact this is one of the few solitary bees that have been observed to buzz-pollinate – the bee ‘vibrates’ in order to persuade the plant to release its pollen. But if it’s nectar they’re after, these bees have a tongue almost as long as their bodies.

Female Fork-Tailed Flower Bee (Photo by Nigel Jones athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/insectman/4800228092

One thing I’ve not been able to determine is why, exactly, this species is known as the ‘fork-tailed’ flower bee. I tried putting the query into Google, just to see what their AI engine would come up with, and here we go…

The fork-tailed flower bee is so named because it has a pair of tiny projections at the tip of its abdomen, which resemble a fork. These projections are more noticeable in females, especially when seen from the side. 

Such utter, utter tosh. Can you see any forks on either of these bees? A few red hairs for sure, but nothing fork-y. Let’s be careful about our sources of information, Peeps. This sounds like someone’s best guess, and I suppose that AI has never been programmed to say ‘I don’t know’.

Fork-tailed Flower Bee (Photo byBy Dick Belgers – Nederlands Soortenregister, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=96675671)