The photo awarded this year as “year’s best wildlife photo” was taken by Karine Aigner and is entitled “The Big Buzz”. Karine has immortalized a group of male specimens of Diadasia Rinconis Cockerell during mating. The males of Diadasia Rinconis when patrolling the territories looking for a female can create aggregations extremely competitive, noisy and aggressive, Ending up tangling all together around the same female in an attempt to achieve mating before the others, this behavior can be observed in a very limited period of time lasting about two weeks.
Unlike its American cousins, honeybees have a totally different approach to both the community lifestyle and the mating that occurs through the practice of nuptial flight. The bees belonging to the family Diadasia Rinconis are particular bees characterized by being oligoleptic, that is, bees specialized in the collection of only one type of pollen and therefore on a small group of vegetable plants such as asters, convolvulus, cacti, mallow and willows. They are native to North and Central America, discovered in 1897 and have since had several nicknames such as “cactus bees” as the main pollinators of cacti and prickly pears native to the Sonoran Desert and the arid regions of North and Central America.
Photo source: BugGuide.Net
The diadasia rinconis cockerell is a solitary bee, each bee of this species builds and provides for its own nest dug in the soil slightly deep. From here comes their other name, “Chimney bees” because of their particular exit holes in the ground characterized by small “chimneys” whose purpose would seem to be to protect the eggs, discouraging any invaders, To make these chimneys some of these bees use land softened with nectar.
There are many types of solitary bees in Europe, so Beeing has developed BeeingHotel a beehive that can be positioned outside that facilitates the passage of pollinators in search of a safe place to winter or nest. The BeeingHotel is totally autonomous does not need anything but an appropriate location, then buying the biodiversity kit will be delivered with it an ebook on bees and flowers friends of bees, to be planted in the area so as to facilitate the passage of pollinators while collecting the fruits of their stay in your garden.