I’m just back from a month in Pomona pet sitting for friends and I thought I’d do a series of short posts about what I was up to during my sojourn.
Probably the most exciting moment was witnessing a cloud of miner bees on one of my walks. There are, apparently, over 1,500 different kinds of miner bees so I’m not sure which species I was witnessing. They are a solitary insect that only emerges once a year for a brief period. Look closely at the video and you can see the little holes where they live.
In fact, I thought I was seeing honeybees but the way they were flying around in a large cloud without settling down didn’t look like normal honeybee behavior. Eventually the very nice homeowners drove up and explained to me what I was witnessing.
They even have a metal sign on their lawn to explain that miner bees are non-aggressive and the brief period when they appear. Nice to see native bees getting some love.