🚨 ARTHROPOD OF THE DAY 🚨

Nomad bees look more like black and yellow wasps than a typical bee. The small striped bee measures 0.31” to 0.39” (8 – 10 mm) and has a distinctive yellow and black abdomen, orange antennae, and yellowish legs. An easy way to tell the nomad bees apart from other bees is their hairless bodies.

The females use olfactory and visual cues for detecting suitable host nests. Upon locating a suitable host nest, she lands nearby, and rests facing the nest entrance. At some point, she enters the host nest where she lays an egg in the wall of a single cell, then leaves.

The host bee will continue to provision the nest cell with food and then seal up the cell. The larvae that hatch from the egg of Nomada have large mandibles (jaws), which they use to destroy the grub of the host bee, and eat the food supplied by its parent.

As a cleptoparastie (a brood parasite), Nomada species have no pollen baskets or scopa on the hind legs for collecting pollen, nor can they create their own nest cells. They are therefore completely reliant on a host.