Tiny bees visiting water lillies

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I noticed some tiny bees hovering around and landing on these water lilies in the garden of my hotel in Thailand. They might be pollinators or just harvesting pollen as one has a pair of small pollen baskets on its hind legs. Water lillies attract an array of pollinators including larger bees (1).

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I took these photos with my Samsung A8 mobile phone. The quality of the cameras in mobile phones continues to improve in leaps and bounds. One can also download editing software to improve the images.

(1) https://rcannon992.com/2015/01/13/bees-love-lilies/

3 comments

  1. Lovely photos and interesting observations, but can I suggest a couple of corrections? They are bees, not wasps, as only bees have pollen baskets. Hard to be certain but judging from their size and overall appearance they could be stingless trigonid bees (genus Trigona and allies). The other thing is that possession of pollen baskets certainly means they visit flowers, but not necessarily that they are pollinators. Once pollen is packed into the baskets it’s unavailable for pollination, so these small “pollen packers” are often not very good pollinators at all.

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