The past few weeks I've been kind of busy with relocating to the Mid Valley. But as things have settled down I made a trip out to the western end of the Valley last Monday. After visitng bug watcher John Christensen found a second Cazier's Tiger beetle at the La Puerta tract of the Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR, I thought I would make another visit. Blooming Texas Lantana and Kidneywood were fantastic out there now but my only tiger beetle was a shauppsi. There were still very few butterflies.
So I headed for home but stopped at Yturria Brush along the way to check out the old entrance. This is where I had found the rare Rio Grande Grassland Tiger Beetles a few weeks earlier. Turned out it was much drier than La Puerta. No tiger beetles and nothing was blooming so no butterflies.
But the south end of the main north/south trail by the freeway has soil that holds misture better and often has flowers when there are none elsewhere. So I walked down to check it out. Yes! There was lots of blooming Skeleton Leaf Goldeneye and Mexican Olive. However there were few butterflies. But there were bees! So I switched to bee mode.
And then I found a bee I didn't know on the Skeleton Leaf Goldeneye. A not very big fuzzy brown bee that vaguely reminded me of something. I shot some photos.
And then another unknown bee. This one was different, disticntly marked and obviously a female loaded with pollen. But it shared the same fuzzy brown thorax as the earlier bee. Was the first bee a male? I photographed several of the females. The red abdomen with black spots and black T1 is striking.
I got quite a few photos of the females and possible males. I figured it would be enough for the iNaturalist bee experts to make an ID. Well I was wrong. iNat came up with an identification to genus, one of the Andrena mining bees. (Mining bee is a poor name as many if not most species of bees nest underground.) That's why it seemed familiar. Last summer I photographed an Andrena up by Canadian in the Texas Panhandle.
PhD candidate at the University of Tenessee, Sam Wilhelm, who helps with many of my bee identifications, has experience with Andrena from the eastern USA. He IDed it to the subgenus Callandrena and suggested it may be an unknown species. He said Texas bee expert Jack Neff was unable to ID it and I should try to get a specimen. Unfortunaletly that would require a Federal permit as this was on a national wildlife refuge. And my other bee expert, Paula Sharp, author of Native Bees of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, said she would sit on the sidelines for this one.
And to add to the bee excitement, I photographed this little red cuckoo bee.
