Bees in Rabat

Posted on by greenbee
iNaturalist suggested this was a furrow bee (Halictus sp.), but I’m really not sure. It’s on a relative of knapweed, Centarea sp.

The first day I walked into the grounds at ICARDA, just a few steps in, a wild bee ran into me, hitting my face mask. I took it as an appropriate sign of welcome! Since then, no more bees have run into me, but I’ve been using my phone to capture photos of plants and insects as I walk around town. I have not mastered taking good close-ups with the phone. I’m still learning to use a new-to-me regular camera and am images from both here.

A mining bee, that may be Andrena florea, a pollen specialist for this wild cucumber called Bryonia. It’s growing as a weed at the center where I work, and it was just a neat coincidence I captured the photo the same day I learned about this particular specialist. Since working on squash bees, I’ve always been curious about the wild cucumbers in the US. They say our squash pollen specialists Peponapis and Xenoglossa traveled north with the cultivated squash from Central America that indigenous peoples brought north.
One person on iNaturalist labeled this as a subspecies of honey bee, Apis mellifera intermissa, the Tellian honey bee, which is characterized by the dark colored body. In the US, we say that the honey bees are active later in the morning and stop being active earlier in the evening than a lot of native bees. Here, where the honey bees are native, I have found them more often than other bees. That could be displacement or saturation (so many honey bees, the others moved elsewhere), but who knows? Of course, it’s a city with a lot of cultivated plants, and the other bees may not be as well adapted to city life and introduced plants (honey bees are generalist foragers), but it’s interesting to me how often I see only honey bees.
A large carpenter bee, Xylocopa sp., being bombarded by a leafcutter bee, Megachile sp. on thistle. Any insights welcome!! This was at Chellah, the Roman fortress where the white storks nest.

When friends helped me come up with the name Wild Bee Plantings, thought it would be a good place to share photos of the bees I saw in the Southeastern US, and also “plant” ideas for using more natives. Instead, I’ve been posting to iNaturalist since last spring’s virtual Mt Rogers event got me using the app. When you share photos c/o iNaturalist, if sharp enough and including key features at appropriate angles, they can become useful records for adding to baseline data about wildlife. Besides that, it’s an amazing tool for identification with a huge community of collaborators. You can post sounds, too–using the app to record (have not figured out yet if or how you can upload separate voice recordings). The photos I post there are rarely especially beautiful, but if I don’t know what they are, the app suggests possibilities and if that doesn’t work, volunteers will help identify it eventually to as close as to species as they can (if not, then family or genus).

I wanted to explain why I’m not posting many bees here, so if you want to check out what I’ve seen in Rabat, visit https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=adamson&verifiable=any. You’ll notice what seem like duplicates, and that’s because you need to have a separate entry for each species, and I usually also want to identify the plants. I’ve been uploading a lot of cultivated species, trying to learn or relearn plants here, but some of the wild plants I’ve documented were added to an African flora group–which is really neat! If you decide to try the app, just label photos in gardens when you upload those images (there’s an option to click “cultivated.”). Besides helping document wildlife, you’ll get to see what’s around you and connect with others, if you want.

2 thoughts on “Bees in Rabat”

  1. Was a little behind in reading my e-mails. So glad I found yours. Love your photos and love reading your blog. Thanks for doing this. Wishing you the best Nancy.

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