Three big coyote yips, bee fly buddy mystery solved

More pictures of these bees can be seen after typing in bee on the search deal.

Behavioral dimorphism sure messed Crumby up this time. That’s right. Long have I pondered bee fly buddy. Is bee fly buddy a bee or a fly? That’s how little was known about bee fly buddy until just now. Here’s what happened.

First I noticed this goofy bee or fly that was a super good flyer. Like this bee or fly was definitely the best flying organism I have ever seen, ever. Bee fly buddy can fly circles around anything. Shitfire, bee fly buddy can fly figure eights around a hummingbird. That’s why I figured bee fly buddy might be a fly, not a bee. It was all the hovering bee fly buddy did that confused me. I never saw a bee hover so much. So I said to myself, Crumby, bee fly buddy is bound to be a hover fly, or maybe a Hoover fly. But I could never get any good pictures of bee fly buddy because bee fly buddy in motion approaches the speed of light, and never sits still, ever.

All that changed last Monday morning. Armed with my new used macro lens I headed out to the pecan orchard. There was bee fly buddy zooming around the penultimate proximate pecan. Yes I had to journey in an easterly direction, face up to fierce, fickle Ogma to reach bee fly buddy habitat. The journey was arduous, the wet grass treacherous. At last I arrived at bee fly buddy habitat. As usual bee fly buddy was zooming around at supersonic speed. OK bee fly buddy, Crumby cried out, if I can’t get some decent pictures of you this time, I am fixing to fetch the butterfly net. You know what that means, bee fly buddy?

My threat to use the butterfly net on bee fly buddy may have slowed bee fly buddy down a smidgen, because this time I got a fairly decent picture or two of bee fly buddy. Yet when I examined the pictures closely, the dern mystery actually deepened. Yes. I could see from the four wings and the antennae that bee fly buddy was a bee. But so what? That totally didn’t explain the relationship between bee buddy and all those other bees that looked practically just like bee buddy, but in comparison, couldn’t fly for shit. Those other ones may look like bee buddy, but they sure didn’t act like, bee buddy.

So this morning I was looking at all my pictures of all these bees. There were the poky ones chewing holes in the bases of the Anisicanthus flowers. There was bee buddy, slightly blurred, zooming along. Hold it, bee buddy has a white face. The rest of these bees have black faces. Hmm. But the truth still didn’t hit me.

Then I decided to try one more time on Bugguide. And there it was. A picture of a bee’s ass with the semi circle rings of yellow hair laterally on the abdomen. Not only, the picture was from Travis County. And in the comments below the picture, someone noted that the males of the species have “yellow” faces.

Hold it, Crumby thought. My bees could be just like this bee only with white faced bee buddy males. And the males could be way better fliers than the lard ass females poking around chewing holes in my Anisicanthus. Eureka! The most common large bee at the CB is probably a subspecies of Xylocopa tabaniformis. Yip! Yip! Yip!