My first insect

Not sure if this is a bee or another insect. This were taken in my mom's garden in Toronto.

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It appears to be a fly - only two wings that I can see. Good capture, regardless.

What lovely portraits for looking at some anatomy! It's a bee, or less likely a wasp.

In the second picture you can see that the thorax and abdomen are separated by a narrow section--the 'wasp waist', that only Hymenoptera have. (It's what lets them bend enough to jab you with the stinger It also lets at least some of them control their body temperature.) On the antennae, you can just about see a long section at the base ('scape'), then a little round section ('pedicel'), then the rest ('flagellum'). All bees and most predatory wasps have antennae like this.

In the first picture you can see the tongue and mandibles (the pincher bits), and it's very much a bee tongue (wasps don't usually have such long ones). The mandibles also match the typical bee/wasp configuration. On the right antennae, I think I can count 10 segments in the flagellum part, which would make it a female. Males have 11 (for 13 total segments).

If you pixel peep on your originals, you may be able to tell if some of the hairs are split and feathery ('plumose'). If they are, then it's definitely a bee, not a wasp. If not, it still might be a bee, but the odds shift to wasp.

Wing counting can be deceptive, because some insects can stack one on top of the other. Instead, if you suspect a fly, look for the halteres (those little balance blobs behind the wings). Depending on the angle of the shot they may be hidden, but when you do see 'em, only flies have 'em.

Lovely shot, I'd say it's a wasp.

Dave

Lovely shots
Brian V.

lovely shots............... gotta be a wasp

Only a wasp if we can account for that long tongue, aka proboscis. I don't say it isn't a wasp, but the only wasps I know of that have a proboscis are the pollen wasps, Pseudomasaris sp., in Vespidae. But this girl(?) isn't one, because they all have clubbed antennae (the tip thicker than the rest), and are rare in north america outside of the dry west (and not very common there).

I couldn't find any good illustrations of bee mouthparts on the web, but there's a photo of a honeybee head and other parts that may be of interest:
http://www.uni.uiuc.ed​u/~stone2/Bee_anatomy.​html

At the bottom of this page, there's a good sketch of vespid mouthparts for comparison:
http://www.kellscraft.​com/Wasps/Wasps05.html

It's also worth looking at the wing veins--there are two submarginal cells, which is less common than three in hymenoptera. It's hard to explain which cells they are, but this page shows wings with two and with three, third line down:
http://konchudb.agr.ag​r.kyushu-u.ac.jp/identify/Colle​tidae-1-e.html

glowie, about how big was it? Size of a bumblebee, honeybee, smaller? That would help narrow down the possibilities.

- Hi Salticid

it's a little bit smaller than a bumblebee and skinnier ( i think). I also saw a bumblebee buzzing around and it was hairier than this one.

- Thanks everyone for kind replies

That there is a hornet, great shots!

Great shots! Love the eyes of the first one and the wing of the second! Great bug!

Thanks, that will help. In your discards, do you have any shots that weren't such fine portraits, but show any of these, all of which are important characteristics?

hind leg (broadened sections or not, how the hairs look)
front of the face (sutures, antennae placement, hairs)
hind wing (veins)
feet (how many 'claws')
bottom of the abdomen (some bees carry pollen there instead of on their legs)

Also, what was it's behavior? Did it spend most of it's time on the flowers, or more time buzzing around the flowers as if it was looking for something?

I may not have time to do much hunting until the weekend. But it's amazing how much more fun it is to try to ID someone else's critter than some of my own that I should be!

OK, someone help me out, here. I don't see a second set of wings on this critter, but nor do I see halteres. Can someone point out the second set of wings?

Thanks,

Tony

The trouble with membranous wings is that if they're even a little out of focus, they can essentially vanish (even when using a hand lens.) In the first picture, on the left side, just above* the thick front vein of the forewing, you can just barely see a bit of membrane that's the hind wing, but even having that much is somewhat lucky. It's much better to look at as many characteristics as possible before narrowing things down too much. *From the critter's point of view, it's below the forewing.

The hind wings of bees and many wasps are generally held below and parallel to the forewing when they aren't flying (either to the side like this one or crossed over the back), and since the hindwing is smaller than the forewing and has fewer veins, they easily disappear. Vespid wasps usually fold both wings lengthwise one on top of the other when perched.

This is absolutely a bee or wasp, not a fly, because of the constriction between the thorax and abdomen, so there must be four wings, whether we see them or not. If it were, or could be, a fly, halteres might be there but not be visible at these angles, or be obscured by the hair, so you hold that thought and look for other clues, such as the antennae, legs, tongue, wing veins, etc.

Usually with photos, you get stuck before you want to be and can't even reliably ID to family. The subject isn't usually cooperative enough to pose and let you get enough of the important bits, which are scattered all over--feet, face, tummy, wings, tongue details, exact bristle placement, etc. And even if it is cooperative, sometimes important bits aren't visible without a microscope and/or dissection (especially for spiders).

The ID issue is probably why I'm less fixated than most on focusing on the eyes. I come from bugs to photography, rather than from photography to bugs, and in some ways I'm ethically challenged. I can see that good focus on eyes makes for a better portrait--but eyes, especially facets, are rarely important for ID, so I always find myself thinking, if only the wing veins (facial sutures, legs, ...) were clear, it might be possible to identify it further. With a reliable ID, you greatly increase the odds of finding out how it lives, which increases the odds of being able to find it again, and even attracting more to live near you, to take more photos!

OK, I'm convinced. It's not a fly.

Thanks,

T.

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that I'm now pretty sure what it is to genus, and a surprise to me, probably to species. The bad news is that it's an invading european, and it isn't known yet what affect it will have on our native bees, especially as it spreads west. It's hoped that it will tend to stay in urban areas and not go wild, but we can only wait and see.

The sound bite: I'm confident that it's a bee in the Megachilidae family (leaf cutters and resin bees), genus Anthidium, probably Anthidium manicatum, the european carder bee. I was wrong about the sex, this one is a male, not a female. Carder bees hitchhiked to North America in the '60s, and hit Ontario in the early '90s where it's now common in gardens and other disturbed situations. The behavior of Anthidium is interesting--the males are very aggressive to other bees (sometimes killing them) and hold territories with good food supplies so they get first dibs on any females. The females line their nests with hairs scraped off of hairy plants such as lamb's ears. Unusually, the males are bigger than the females.

As to finding it, ya'll already know that I gave a lot of weight to that proboscis and the two submarginal cells. I tried to find wasps that might have those. I was able to eliminate a bunch of families, but not all of them. So I gave that up and took my first serious dive into Michener's "Bees of the World". It has extensive descriptions of all of the families and genera, and keys too, but a lot of that I had to skip because mouthparts and other invisibles get used so much. But those two submarginal cells narrowed things down pretty well, and the body shape pointed pretty quickly to Megachilidae. When I got there, the sketches of the wing veins and labrum pretty much clinched it. I'd have been happy just with that, but I picked a few likely genera, googled, and eventually hit pay dirt, primarily because it is an invading species so it gets a lot of attention, from photos to articles about the invasion. A few of them:

http://bugguide.net/no​de/view/7744
http://bugguide.net/no​de/view/9452/bgimage
http://www.insectpix.n​et/wool_carder_bee.htm
pdf, but no pictures:
http://www3.uakron.edu …ller%20et%20al%​202002.pdf