That’s me, emerging from my ground nest. I shared the nest with at least 12 other females. We had multiple entry holes. We made this in a patch of sparse grass, near a flower bed with zinnia, Diervilla, buttonbush, and single dahlias.

Don’t mind me. My girlfriends and I are just nesting in your lawn. Don’t run! I’m not a wasp. I’m a Halictid bee. We aren’t very hairy and males have absolutely spindly legs, so I see why you might have thought I was a wasp. People call us bicolored sweat bees, but we aren’t even attracted to human sweat.  My sting won’t hurt and I don’t have anyone guarding my nest, so there’s no risk of a swarm (although imagine how pretty that would be).   

Nice to meet you!

Officially, I’m Agapostemon virescens (ag-uh-pos-tem-un), but people just call me bicolored striped sweat bee. Not many bees are famous enough to get a common name; most are saddled with the intimidating scientific name in Latin only. I’m both beautiful and plentiful (what a great combination), so I get a common name. I’m unmistakable with a brilliant green head, eyes and thorax. My abdomen is a striking black with white hair bands.  You can find me and other females starting in June, while the males emerge later and are frequent visitors to hollyhocks and Rose of Sharons in August and September. You’ll see us in London and other towns. 

Sure, there are other green sweat bees. In Ontario, there are three other species of Agapostemon and three species of Augochlorini, which makes it complicated when people just call us metallic green sweat bees.You can tell me apart from Augochlorini because they have a notch out of their compound eyes while mine are oval. And only my species has females with the striped white-black abdomen. You’ll want all of us in your garden though because of our gem-like tones and our pollination services.All the green sweat bees are generalists, meaning we can visit a range of flowers for pollen. We are most frequently seen in aster-family members. We have short tongues, so flowers with long, narrow tube-shapes are not visited by us (cardinal flowers near my nest were never visited). Looking at my A. virescens friends on iNaturalist, you can see that we frequent wild asters, joe pye weed, single roses, chives. You can see pollen on the hind legs of females. We take this back to the nest for our larvae to eat. Any native plant in the aster family that blooms in summer will be appreciated by us: coreopsis, coneflowers, false sunflowers, sunflowers…so many options.

Our nest is in the ground and the entrance will be surrounded by a hill of soil. Several dozen A. virescens females can share a ground nest, but we do so opportunistically. If no other females are around, we will happily nest alone.  If you didn’t look closely, you might think the nest was an ant hill! But the entrance hole is much larger than an anthill. We nest in aggregations to limit parasitism by the cuckoo bees, who are always trying to lay their eggs in other bees’ nests. If you see an anthill with a pencil-sized hole, that might be our nest. Try not to disturb it so we can successfully fill each cell with an egg and a ball of pollen, baby bee’s first meal. 

I’m even the official bee of the City of Toronto! Why? Because I live in a condo, I’m abundant in cities in SW Ontario, and I’m very fashionable. Hope to see you in the garden this year!