ID please - bee or wasp?

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Shirley Hardy
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ID please - bee or wasp?

Last week I was out photographing bees on my Pink Champagne Bottlebrush and noticed lots of these critters as well as the introduced honey bees and native bees and the odd yellow/brown coloured wasps (and a few weeks prior to this I saw a huge bright blue metallic coloured wasp in the garden. No photo though). This yellow and black striped pollinator was 1/3 to 1/2 the size larger (longer) than a introduced honey bee, smoothed body, a furry head that was brownish in colour, and long, thick antennae, with brown wings. This is also a 3/4? grown one as my brother saw a much larger one that had green fur on the head. For the most part when pollinating a flower it would grab hold of the flower then curl it's abdomen under the part where the flowers came out like it was trying to mate with the flower pod section thingy. But it seemed, on closer inspection, this was just it's way of hanging onto the flower when there were just a few flowers in a small group unlike what is shown in the photos below. I didn't see any hanky panky going on with the insect toward the flowers that I was aware of.

Does anyone know what species this bee/wasp is and is it indigenous, roughly, to the Tenterfield, NSW area of where I live? I don't recall seeing this species here before.

Shirley Hardy
Shirley Hardy's picture

I've been doing a bit of research to ID this species and it may possibly be a bee mimicking wasp. A few days ago I rescued one of them that was trapped inside my letterbox caught in an unused cob web. The top most part of the bottlebrush branch that had flowers on it got trapped inside the letterbox after mail was delivered by the postie. I managed to carefully get it's legs untangled from the cobweb and helped it get onto another stick. In the process it got it's middle section unstuck from the cobweb that had it trapped and it then rested on the stick for a minute before flying away.

On closer inspection of this critter it had black legs, it carried white pollen balls (or pouches) on it's legs and had a small black stinger. When I was trying to free it from the cobweb after I put it onto the first stick it remained perfectly still for me. It seemed to know I was trying to help it. 

Since then I had to tie up the bottlebrush to prevent two branches from drooping toward the letterbox, thus preventing these creatures and other pollinators from becoming trapped in the letterbox. Problem solved.

I'm at Tenterfield, NSW. (Formerly known as "Hyperbirds".)

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