Somehow I had never seen a bumblebee pollinate a passionflower before! 🐝 Look how much pollen collects on her back as she drinks the nectar: the gap in the flower that she’s moving through looks perfectly tailored to the body of a large bee. You can imagine that a smaller thing like a honeybee might visit to drink the nectar without actually catching any pollen and therefore would not be an effective pollinator of this plant.

Some bee species can look very similar but be completely different behaviourally. 🐝 The Ivy Bee and the Honeybee are good examples of this. If you’re not looking closely you might not realise they are different. They are around the same size, and you can see a lot of both species foraging together on the ivy at this time of the year (see the second image). The best ways to tell them apart are that the Ivy Bee has very clear sharp bands of bright yellow on its abdomen. The Honeybee has hairy eyes while the Ivy Bee has smooth. Honeybees live in colonies with queens and workers. The one pictured here is a sterile female worker who will be collecting pollen to provision the queen’s brood. Thousands of other workers will be out collecting pollen for the same brood. These workers do not reproduce themselves. In contrast, Ivy Bees are solitary, don’t live in colonies, and don’t have queens or workers. The bee pictured here is a female who is independently collecting pollen for her own brood. She has no help in this process, even from the male she mated with.