Sharp-collared Furrow Bee

• It is called a sweat bee because it settles on human skin to drink the salts of perspiration.
• It is one of the key species for understanding the origin of social life in insects: within the same group there are solitary and social populations depending on climate and altitude.
• Its nests, clustered by the hundred in a single bank, make it an important pollinator of wild flora and of crops.
• It is called a sweat bee because several species in the group land on the skin to drink sweat, drawn by the salt.
• It is one of the key species for understanding the origin of social life in insects. It is primitively eusocial: a founding female rears a first brood of daughters that stay on as workers, and the future queens appear in the second.
• That system is reversible and flexible, and in populations in the north of its range it can become solitary: the same species is social or solitary depending on the climate, which makes it an exceptional model for studying how eusociality appears and disappears.
• The foundress guards the nest entrance with her head acting as a plug, and controls who goes in and who comes out.
• It is an abundant, valuable generalist pollinator of crops and wild flora.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Banks, paths and bare sunny ground in Europe

Sources consulted: Wcislo y Danforth; Field et al. (2010 y 2012), Current Biology; Schwarz, Richards y Danforth (2007), Annual Review of Entomology

Best time: March to September, on flowers over sunny, compacted ground