{"id":3888,"date":"2013-07-20T23:10:36","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T04:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/?p=3888"},"modified":"2013-07-23T21:03:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T02:03:05","slug":"megachile-leaf-cutting-bee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/?p=3888","title":{"rendered":"<em>Halictus parallelus<\/em> (A Sweat Bee)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_3889\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3889\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x-350x233.jpg\" alt=\"Halictus parallelus (A Sweat Bee)\" width=\"350\" height=\"233\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3889\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x-350x233.jpg 350w, https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x-800x533.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/img_20130720_063348x.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-3889\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Halictus parallelus<\/em> (A Sweat Bee)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;m pretty pleased with this picture of a leaf-cutting bee. It could be better, to be sure, but I&#8217;m pretty psyched with it. The best part, in my view, is what it shows about bees&#8217; eyes. Most people are familiar with the fact that most insects have compound eyes. These compound eyes are called oculi (singular oculus) and are made up of up to 9,000 ommatidia, the individual components of the eyes. What you may not know is that many insects have three additional simple eyes, called ocelli (singular ocellus) on the top of their head, arranged in a triangle. That&#8217;s right, they have five eyes, not two.<\/p>\n<p>If you enlarge this image you should be able to see the three &#x201c;additional&#x201d; eyes on this leaf-cutting bee&#8217;s head. You&#8217;ll also get a nice view of the mandibles that she uses to cut pieces of leaf (thus the common name) to use as separators between cells of her nest.<\/p>\n<p>Update: The good folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/bugguide.net\/node\/view\/810326\" title=\"BugGuide\" target=\"_blank\">BugGuide.net<\/a> have identified this as <em>Halictus parallelus<\/em> (A Sweat Bee) (and a male, at that) rather than a <em>Megachile<\/em> (Leaf-cutting Bee). I have change the title and the caption on the photograph to reflect this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m pretty pleased with this picture of a leaf-cutting bee. It could be better, to be sure, but I&#8217;m pretty psyched with it. The best part, in my view, is what it shows about bees&#8217; eyes. Most people are familiar with the fact that most insects have compound eyes. These compound eyes are called oculi &hellip; <a class=\"read-excerpt\" href=\"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/?p=3888\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&raquo;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3888"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3917,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3888\/revisions\/3917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henryhartley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}