Berlanguella scopae Ortea, Bacallado & Valdés, 1992. Accessed through: World Register of Marine Species on 2012-02-26.
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Branched hairs or scopae on the hind legs help to carry the large, coarse pollen of cucurbits. Males lack scopae, as they do not collect pollen. This bee relies on wild and cultivated squashes, pumpkins, gourds, and related plants. It may occasionally obtain nectar from other types of plants, but the female will only use Cucurbit pollen to provision her young.
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The bees are overall very wasp-like in appearance, lacking scopae and being slender and far less hairy than many non-cleptoparasitic bees. The colouration of the metasoma is also more typical of wasps. The lack of pollen-collecting scopae is an evolutionary loss of structure that is common to almost all cleptoparastic bees as they have no need to gather pollen, nor nests in which to store it. Species in this genus vary from in size, considered small for bees.
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Berlanguella scopae is similar in appearance to species of Doriopsis with low rounded tubercles on the mantle and the gills arranged in a flat horseshoe-shape. It is translucent white or cream with yellow or orange tubercles.
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The head, thorax, and abdomen of M. nuda females are a dark black. Females have dense white scopa on their posterior tibiae that are foraging adaptations used for collecting and carrying floral oils and pollen. These scopae are distinct from other bees as they use capillary action to hold floral oils.
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Ptilothrix is a genus within the tribe Emphorini of the family Apidae (bumblebees, euglossines, honeybees, stingless bees). Bees of this genus can range from 7 to 15 millimeters. Ptilothrix species are solitary ground nesting bees. The genus has especially prominent leg hairs, called scopae, to help gather pollen to provision their nests.
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Berlanguella is a genus of sea slugs, specifically dorid nudibranchs, shell- less marine gastropod molluscs in the family Chromodorididae.Bouchet, P. (2011). Berlanguella Ortea, Bacallado & Valdés, 1992, accessed through World Register of Marine Species on 2012-02-25 It is a monotypic genus and Berlanguella scopae is the only species in the genus.Bouchet, P. (2011).
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A European honey bee with corbicula full of pollen, returning to the hive The pollen basket or corbicula (plural corbiculae) is part of the tibia on the hind legs of certain species of bees. They use the structure in harvesting pollen and carrying it to the nest or hive. Other species of bees have scopae instead.
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The subfamily Dasypodainae (originally named "Dasypodidae") is a small subfamily of melittid bees, with more than 100 species in eight genera,Michez D. (2008) Monographic revision of the melittid bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea, Melittidae sensu lato). Proc. Neth. Entomol. Soc. Meet. 19: 31-39. found in Africa and the northern temperate zone, primarily in xeric habitats. They are typically small to moderate-sized bees, with shaggy scopae, and are commonly oligolectic (e.g.
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Andrena scotica females are similar in size to a honey bee (Apis mellifera), larger than most of its congeners. They possess very small pollen baskets or flocci on their hind legs and the long, pale scopae are dark on distally and curly proximally. They have a covering of fine brown to orange hairs, which is denser on the thorax, with face being the same colour. There is a fine covering of shorter hairs on the abdomen and the hind tibia is dark.
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This may allow Ptilothrix species to thrive alongside other introduced species, such as honeybees, as it may reduce interspecific competition for pollen resources. Scopae are thought to have advantages in evapotranspiration and reflecting sunlight to keep bees cool in hot, arid environments in contrast to other members in the Apidae, such as honeybees and bumblebees, that have hairless pollen baskets (corbiculae) to carry their pollen on their legs. Ptilothrix species are able to walk on the surface of water while being supported by their legs.Rust, R.W. 1980.
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A. vaga is a large mining bee, 13-15mm in length, which has the entire thorax clothed in grey hairs, sometimes showing a slight buff tinge, the scopae and hind have white hairs. It also has patches of white hairs on the abdomen sides. On closer examination the surface of the cuticle can be seen to be shiny metallic black. The face is covered with brownish hairs Males resemble have the entire upper surface of the thorax covered in grey hair and pale hair on the hind tibia.
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It has been observed collecting pollen from Coronilla, Hippocrepis, Lotus, Medicago, Melilotus, Onobrychis, Trifolium and Vicia. It has also been observed to collect pollen from some members of the Lamiaceae, Asteraceae, Brassicaceae, Hypericaceae and Ranunculaceae The scopae of the females are used to comb pollen from the nototribic anthers of Lamiaceae and Antirrhineae. Occupied cocoons of the sapygid wasp Sapyga quinquepunctata have been recovered from a nest of Osmia caerulescens and the Natural History Museum, London has specimens of S. quinquepunctata which have been reared from the nests of O. caerulescens.
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The Ctenoplectrini are characterised by short tongues, modified scopae and large comb-like tibial spurs adapted to collect and carry a mixture of floral oils and pollen. The unusual morphology has made it difficult to infer their closest relatives, in turn preventing an understanding of these bees’ geographic and temporal origin and had led early authors to place them in their own family Ctenoplectridae. Recent molecular phylogenetic analyses find Ctenoplectrini to be monophyletic and closest to the long-horned bees, Eucerini. Most of the tribe's species collect floral oil, pollen, and nectar from a few genera of the family Cucurbitaceae.
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The Andrenidae are typically small to moderate-sized bees, which often have scopae on the basal segments of the leg in addition to the tibia, and are commonly oligolectic (especially within the subfamily Panurginae). They can be separated from other bee families by the presence of two subantennal sutures on the face, a primitive trait shared with the sphecoid wasps. Many groups also have depressions or grooves called "foveae" on the head near the upper margin of the eyes, another feature seen in sphecoids, and also shared by some Colletidae. Andrenids are among the few bee families that have no cleptoparasites.
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In the familiar honey bees and bumblebees, the scopa is replaced by the pollen basket (corbicula). In the Ptilothrix genus, the notably long scopa allow the members of the genus to collect long grained pollen. Bees have other types of modified hairs used to collect pollen, floral oils, or other chemicals from plants, and these can be on the face, mouthparts, or the front or middle legs, but these are not scopae; the term is explicitly restricted to hairs used to transport pollen. There are some bees which transport pollen internally in the crop, and these lack a scopa, as do cleptoparasitic bees, which do not gather their own pollen.
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Oregon. PDF fulltext As in other cuckoo bees, females can be easily distinguished from those of their hosts by the lack of scopae and other pollen-collecting adaptations, as well as lacking prepygidial fimbria and basitibial plates. Their body hair is rather short and on the abdomen lies flat against the exoskeleton. They may, therefore, be difficult at first glance to distinguish from the Nomadinae, but the details of their wing venation are characteristic: the marginal cell is shorter than the first two submarginal cells, and the second abscissa of vein M+Cu is extremely short, with the cells it connects being almost adjacent to each other.
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Melittinae is a small melittid subfamily, with some 60 species in four genera, restricted to Africa and the northern temperate zone. They are typically small to moderate-sized bees, which often have shaggy scopae, and are commonly oligolectic; several species further specialize on floral oils as larval food rather than pollen, including Rediviva emdeorum, a highly unusual species in which the forelegs are longer than the entire body, and used to sponge up the floral oil at the end of elongated corolla spurs of the host plant, Diascia.C. D. Michener (2000) The Bees of the World, Johns Hopkins University Press. The Melittinae are known from a fossil of Palaeomacropis eocenicus in the Early Eocene of Oise, France.
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A leaf-cutter bee showing abdominal scopa Megachilidae is a cosmopolitan family of mostly solitary bees whose pollen-carrying structure (called a scopa) is restricted to the ventral surface of the abdomen (rather than mostly or exclusively on the hind legs as in other bee families). Megachilid genera are most commonly known as mason bees and leafcutter bees, reflecting the materials from which they build their nest cells (soil or leaves, respectively); a few collect plant or animal hairs and fibers, and are called carder bees, while others use plant resins in nest construction and are correspondingly called resin bees. All species feed on nectar and pollen, but a few are kleptoparasites (informally called "cuckoo bees"), feeding on pollen collected by other megachilid bees. Parasitic species do not possess scopae.
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Abdominal scopa of Megachile on a composite A scopa (plural scopae; Latin for "broom") is any of a number of different modifications on the body of a non- parasitic bee that form a pollen-carrying apparatus. In most bees, the scopa is simply a particularly dense mass of elongated, often branched, hairs (or setae) on the hind leg. When present on the hind legs, the modified hairs are, at a minimum, on the tibia, but some bees also have modified hairs on the femur and/or trochanter. A few bees have, in addition to the leg hairs, many modified hairs on the ventral surface of the abdomen which are also used in pollen transport; there is one family of bees, Megachilidae, in which the modified leg hairs are absent, and the scopa is limited to the abdominal hairs (see photo).
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