''Megachile texana'', the Texas leafcutter bee, is a species of

bee Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamil ...

in the family

Megachilidae Megachilidae is a cosmopolitan family of mostly solitary bees. Characteristic traits of this family are the restriction of their pollen-carrying structure (called a '' scopa'') to the ventral surface of the abdomen (rather than mostly or exclu ...

. It was

first First most commonly refers to: * First, the ordinal form of the number 1 First or 1st may also refer to: Acronyms * Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array * Far Infrared a ...

described by the American

entomologist Entomology (from Ancient Greek ἔντομον (''éntomon''), meaning "insect", and -logy from λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study") is the branch of zoology that focuses on insects. Those who study entomology are known as entomologists. In ...

Ezra Townsend Cresson Ezra Townsend Cresson (18 June 1838, in Byberry19 April 1926, in Swarthmore) was an American entomologist who specialized in the Hymenoptera order of insects. He wrote ''Synopsis of the families and genera of the Hymenoptera of America, north of ...

in 1878. It is native to the United States and southern Canada.

Description

The female ''Megachile texana'' is between long and the male between . The head and thorax are clad in short, dense whitish hair. The wings are semi-transparent with black veins. The abdomen is barred in black and yellowish-white.

Biology

The nests of ''Megachile texana'' often occur in pasture, with the entrance being under a rock, under a clod of earth or in one case, on a small hillock. The burrows may be up to long and the upper side is often the underside of a flat stone. Sometimes a pre-existing cavity is used, but females have been observed excavating their own nests. A single cell or several cells may be constructed, each lined with cut portions of leaf in a similar way to the nests of ''

Megachile rubi ''Megachile rubi'' is a species of leaf cutting bee in the family Megachilidae, found in the eastern United States. First described by Mitchell in 1924, it is placed in the subgenus ''Xeromegachile'', members of which are most often found in sa ...

''. Each cell is half-filled with a mixture of

pollen Pollen is a powdery substance produced by most types of flowers of seed plants for the purpose of sexual reproduction. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced Gametophyte#Heterospory, microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm ...

and

nectar Nectar is a viscous, sugar-rich liquid produced by Plant, plants in glands called nectaries, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollination, pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to an ...

and an

egg An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the ...

laid on the food mass. The

larva A larva (; : larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into their next life stage. Animals with indirect development such as insects, some arachnids, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase ...

consumes its food supply and when sufficiently developed becomes an inactive prepupa enclosed in a cocoon which fills the cell. The outer surface of the cocoon is wound round with brownish threads.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q2100391 Texana Hymenoptera of North America Insects of Canada Insects of the United States Insects described in 1878