Blue-banded bee
The blue-banded bee is an Australian bee with shiny pale blue stripes across its body. It zips around very fast from flower to flower. It lives alone, not in a big hive like honey bees.
How big is it?
How long is it?
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How fast is it?
Fun facts
It does buzz pollination: it holds on to a flower and shakes so hard that the pollen falls out. Tomato flowers love this.
A boy has five blue stripes and a girl has four.
At night the boys sleep holding on to a plant stem with their jaws.
Each mother digs her own tunnel nest in soft sandstone, dry river banks or even the mortar between bricks.
Most asked questions about Blue-banded bee
?Where do blue-banded bees live?
In Australia. Each female digs her own nest tunnel in soft rock, clay or old brick walls.
?How big is a blue-banded bee?
It grows to about 10 to 12 millimetres long, a bit like a honey bee.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Amegilla cingulata
- Named by
- Fabricius, 1775
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Amegilla cingulata (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by James Niland from Brisbane, Australia. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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