![]() The females have pale scopal hairs on their hind legs and often appear lugging bright yellow saddlebags overflowering with pollen. Ligated sweat bees are blackish-brown with white bands of hair on their abdomens dark eyes and clear wings with brown veins. Ligated sweat bees are thus efficient pollinators of many species of wildflowers, among them bee balm, penstemon, goldenrod, bloodroot, rue anemone, dandelion, and violets. Nevertheless, these tiny bees have an advantage when feeding on nectar in flowers too small for large bees to enter. ![]() The bees are so small that when they feed on milkweed, they have to be careful not to fall into the blossoms - if they do, they can become trapped in the flowers' sticky pollen-holding sacs (called pollinia) and expire. These wild bees, however, have short tongues and are unable to forage for nectar in deep-throated blossoms. Ligated sweat bees are key pollinators of wildflowers. These bees are nevertheless generalist pollinators and thus are also common visitors to the gardens of Stone Barns and to wildflowers lining park trails. (The others are longhorn bees, sunflower bees and West Coast yellow-faced bumble bees.) Ligated sweat bees avidly frequent sunflower plantings of Stone Barns' vegetable fields. Despite their small size, ligated sweat bees are among the four most important pollinators of commercial sunflowers. If you look carefully at the coneflowers in the park's Visitor Center garden, you might well see two or three of these wild bees on a single blossom. A ligated sweat bee is smaller than the head of a dime. They first appear in early spring and remain through mid-fall. Halictus sweat bees are a common sight in the park and at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Some Halictus are solitary and others nest in semi-social groups that pass through multiple generations in a single summer. The bees nest in the ground, in loose soils. New York’s Halictus bees are generalist foragers that pollinate a broad range of wildflowers and garden flowers as well as commercial crops. Males lack scopal hairs and tend to have partially yellow legs and faces. Females have dark faces and dark legs covered with fine pale hairs, and they carry pollen on scopae (sticky brushes) located on their hind legs. ![]() Halictus sweat bees native to New York are small to very small, dark brown or black bees with pale stripes of hair on their abdomens. There are 25 species in the Americas, and 6 in the New York area. ![]() Halictus sweat bees are found throughout throughout the world. Below is a sampling of Halictus and Lasioglossum sweat bees inhabiting Rockefeller State Park Preserve and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. In our area, dark sweat bees divide mainly into two large genuses - Halictus and Lasioglossum. Sweat bees shown in this guide represent six distinct sweat bee genera that can be grouped roughly by their salient characteristics: (1) iridescent green sweat bees, which are covered in Part I of this guide's section on sweat bees and (2) sweat bees, covered here in Part II, that are dark in color, often with striped abdomens or with a metallic sheen. Sweat bees come in a multitude of varieties and colors, and span 14 genera (genuses) within the United States. Sweat bees are also essential pollinators of native flora, appearing in all seasons in New York on an extensive array of flowering plants found in woodlands and fields. Sweat bees are a highly important group of wild pollinators, responsible for the pollination of an impressive range of commercial crops - among them squash, legumes, sunflowers, watermelons, apples, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes and peppers, to name but a few. Halictidae, tiny nonaggressive "sweat bees," comprise one of the seven bee families in the order Hymenoptera. ![]()
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