In the arid Southwest, prickly pear and other cactus flowers rely heavily on one group of hard-working specialists: cactus bees in the genus Diadasia. Genuinely well-adapted to a demanding desert lifestyle and a narrow floral menu, these native bees share…
Small, dark, mostly hairless, and easy to mistake for a wasp at a glance — yellow-faced bees in the genus Hylaeus break several of the visual rules most people use to recognize a bee. They also break a genuinely fundamental…
Every bumblebee queen most people picture starts her own colony from scratch — finding a nest site, laying eggs, and raising the first generation of workers herself. Cuckoo bumblebees, classified in the subgenus Psithyrus within the genus Bombus, skip that…
Almost every single bee covered on this site forages for essentially the same two basic things — nectar and pollen. Oil-collecting bees break that pattern entirely: certain native bees, most notably in the genus Macropis, gather floral oil from specialized…
Few genuinely ordinary insect encounters generate as much alarmed texting-a-photo-to-everyone-you-know energy as the American pelecinid wasp, Pelecinus polyturator — an all-black wasp with a body so extraordinarily elongated it looks like something assembled from spare parts. Despite the intimidating length…
An all-black wasp well over three-quarters of an inch long, dragging a paralyzed katydid slowly across your lawn toward a waiting burrow, is a genuinely alarming sight the first time you happen to see it — and it’s also a…
If a paper wasp nest around your home looks more yellow-and-black striped than the brown paper wasps you remember from childhood, you may be looking at Polistes dominula, the European paper wasp — a species that has spread rapidly and…
Most insects covered on this site get confused with bees or wasps because they look harmless and happen to share a color pattern. Robber flies are the opposite case: a genuine aerial predator, capable of taking down bees, wasps, and…
If you’ve ever found a tomato hornworm in your garden studded with small white oval cocoons and wondered whether it was diseased, dying, or something stranger, you were looking at one of the most common — and most misunderstood —…