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Sticker of Fine striped sweat bee
Bug card No. 1672 of 4,939

Fine striped sweat bee

Agapostemon subtilior
Name means: “subtilior means finer, more slender or thinner”

The fine striped sweat bee is a small, shiny green bee from North America. The females are green all over, while the males have yellow stripes on their tails. It lives alone and digs its nest in the ground.

Lives in
The northern and central United States and the west coast down to Mexico
Length
0.9 to 1.1 cm (0.35 to 0.43 in)
Top speed
about 21 km/h (13 mph)
Flying, estimate
What does it eat?
It visits many different kinds of flowers to drink nectar and collect pollen.
For real!Photo of Fine striped sweat bee
Picture by BBTWellParkour. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Fine striped sweat bee about 1.1 cm long (0.43 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)
as long as 2 grains of rice in a rowcould fly across a whole football pitch in 18 secondsmoves 530 times its own body length every second

How big is Fine striped sweat bee compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Its colour can change with the weather. It looks more bluish when the air is dry and paler green when the air is damp.

2

It is not a picky eater. It collects pollen from lots of different plants.

3

For almost 90 years scientists thought it was the same as another bee. In 2024 it got its own name back.

4

The females are about 11 millimetres long, and the males are a little smaller.

you asked

Most asked questions about Fine striped sweat bee

?Where does the fine striped sweat bee live?

In the northern and central United States and along the west coast. It nests in little burrows in the ground.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Agapostemon subtilior
Named by
Cockerell, 1898
Group
Bees and bumblebees
Family
Halictidae
Classification
Insecta > Hymenoptera > Halictidae
Lives on
North America

Where the facts come from

  1. Agapostemon subtilior (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by BBTWellParkour. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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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