Hello Dick,
Nice shots of the bees on the flowers. The first is the common
honey bee, looks like it's on a milkweed blossom. The second, as
another member mentioned, looks like a spider wasp. They sting spiders
(or caterpillars, or leafhoppers, or some other specific prey) and leave
these in a simple mud tube of a nest for the wasp's larva to feed on.
The third, as you thought, is some species of bumble bee. It seems to
be extracting the nectar from the flower by biting a hole at the
flower's base and inserting its proboscis ("thingie") into the nectary
(the nectar-producing part of the flower). Flowers can be sneaky--some
have a sort of spring-loaded affair that hits the bee on the back to
deposit a bunch of pollen on the bee's back. Some bees finally get
tired of this repeated abuse and avoid this trap by bypassing the normal
"down the throat" approach and instead extract the nectar by sneaking in
from the side. The bumble bee appears to be doing this. Honey bees are
only marginally effective pollinators of alfalfa--they quickly figure
out how to avoid the "in your face" greeting they get from the
spring-loaded pollen-bearing parts of the flower, and they extract the
nectar from the flower, without doing any useful pollination, by doing
what this bumble bee seems to be doing. Leaf cutter bees never seem to
learn this trick, and farmers who try to produce a crop of alfalfa seed
put colonies of these leaf cutter bees near their blooming alfalfa
fields to get good pollination of the flowers and hence a good seed set.
Nice to have you back, Dick.
Dean (the lurking entomologist)
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