For all its parasitic behaviour, a cuckoo bee is beautiful to look at.
A cuckoo bee looks something like a wasp—but it isn’t a wasp; it’s a bee. There are quite a few different apian species that have earned the name, cuckoo bee: a bee that has the habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other bees (and so behaves in a manner reminiscent of cuckoo birds). Cuckoo bee females are best recognized by the fact that they lack pollen-collecting structures. Further, they neither construct their own nests, nor have much body hair.
Most cuckoo bees are in the sub-family, nomandinae, but there are many different species, a number of which I have seen in my garden. I don’t know which species today’s cuckoo bee is.
The loveliest looking species of cuckoo bee I have seen in my garden is this one from three years ago.
