This nice metallic bee made her way on the beehotel: a female Brassy mining bee (Lasioglossum morio), a bee from the family Sweat bees (Lasioglossum) [1,2].
The bee has a metallic green head and thorax. The abdomen is bronze metallic colored and has sideway hairbands on the base of the tergite edges [2].
It is common in the Netherlands but two other green metallic colored species in this genus are rare, being Lasioglossum leucopus and Lasioglossum nitidulum.
The bee is a female which is apart from the groove in the last tergite.
It is not exactly clear to me what the bee was looking for, a place to sleep, a nesting place or just something extraordinary. I haven’t been able to find information to shed some light on this, apart for observations of this bee species on the bee hotel.
To be continued…?!
UPDATE 2019/VIII/17
This year there are many Brassy mining bees in juli en augustus, mainly males. They forage on flowers or rest on walls, plants and regularly on the bee hotel where they visit the holes for this purpose.
Literature
1 wildebijen.nl, "De Nederlandse bijen en hun relaties, overzicht van in Nederland en Vlaanderen voorkomende solitaire en sociale bijen (Apidea s.l.)"2 Peeters, T.M.J., H. Nieuwenhuijsen, J. Smit, F. van der Meer, I.P. Raemakers, W.R.B. Heitmans, C. van Achterberg, M. Kwak, A.J. Loonstra, J. de Rond, M. Roos & M. Reemer 2012. De Nederlands bijen (Hymennoptera: Apidae s.l.). - Natuur van Nederland 11, Naturalis Biodiversity Center & European Invertebrate Survey - Nederland, Leiden.
