Black-and-gray leafcutter bee
The black-and-gray leafcutter bee is a fuzzy North American bee with a black head and pale hair on its back. It cuts neat little pieces out of leaves and uses them to build its nest. Under its belly it carries pollen in a brush of reddish-brown hairs.
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Fun facts
It makes its nest in a hole in the ground or another small gap, and lines each little room with cut leaf pieces.
Each little room gets one egg and a packed lunch of nectar and pollen.
It helps pollinate a rare slipper orchid that otherwise gets visits almost only from big bumblebee queens.
Cuckoo bees sneak their own eggs into its nest, so their babies can eat the food it collected.
Females are a bit bigger than males, about 12 to 14 mm long.
Most asked questions about Black-and-gray leafcutter bee
?Why do leafcutter bees cut leaves?
They use the leaf pieces to line the little rooms of their nest, where their babies grow.
?Where does the black-and-gray leafcutter bee live?
In North America, from Nova Scotia in the east to British Columbia and Alaska in the west.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Megachile melanophaea
- Named by
- Smith, 1853
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Megachilidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Megachilidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Megachile melanophaea (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 USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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