Power bees
| Power bees | ||||||||||||
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Biastes brevicornis |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Biastes | ||||||||||||
| Tank , 1798 |
The bees ( Biastes ) are a genus of the family of Apidae within the bees . They occur in Europe with only three types, which are also native to Central Europe. The genus is widespread in the Palearctic . Because the hosts of the parasitic power bees are rare and endangered, the power bees are also threatened.
features
The bees reach a body length of five to eight millimeters and have a stocky build with a flattened abdomen. They are only short and weakly hairy, with the head and thorax of Biastes truncatus only very weakly hairy. On the sixth segment of the abdomen, the corners of the sternite are provided with claw-shaped projections in females . The males have several sternites with yellowish felt covers in the middle of the abdomen. The European species can be easily distinguished from one another.
Way of life
The animals parasitize as devil bees the three closely related genera of Schlürfbienen ( Rophites ), gloss bees ( Dufourea ) and systropha ( Systropha ). They only fly from June or July, when their hosts are active, and can then be found near their nests or forage plants until August . At night the bees cling to plants with their mandibles , or spend the night inside flowers. The females lay their flat, uncurved eggs lengthways in a gap in the cell wall of the host nests, in which the egg is later fitted flush. The gap is probably scratched by the claw-shaped projections on the sternites. The larvae of the power bees pupate without a cocoon .
The Imagines talk at night and during the day in bad weather with the mandibles bitten on parts of plants, rare in flowers on.
In some species the males have only 12 antennae, which is otherwise only found in Pasites males. In all other native bees, the males have 13 antennae and the females 12.
Species (Europe)
- Biastes brevicornis (Panzer, 1798)
- Biastes emarginatus (Schenck, 1853)
- Biastes truncatus (Nylander, 1848)
swell
Individual evidence
- ↑ Biastes. FaunaEuropaea, accessed April 25, 2008 .
- ↑ E. Scheuchl & W. Wilner: Pocket Dictionary of wild bees in Central Europe . Quelle & Meyer, Quelle & Meyer, Wiebelsheim, Hunsrück 2016, ISBN 978-3-494-01653-5 , p. 246 .
literature
- Andreas Müller, Albert Krebs, Felix Amiet: Bees. Central European species, way of life, observation. Naturbuch-Verlag, Augsburg 1997, ISBN 3-89440-241-5 .
