

Welcome to Blue Banded Bees



Introduction to the Blue Banded Bee – Amegilla cingulata



The beautiful Blue Banded Bee has a furry golden thorax and iridescent blue or white stripes on a glossy black abdomen, and they grow to 11-12mm. This is a solitary bee but females may build nest together in same location. As they get older, the fur on the thorax becomes more sparse.



The males have five complete bands and females have four, and the species gets its name from the latin word “cingulum”, meaning belt, and refers to the bee's bright abdominal bands. Blue Banded Bees have large bulging eyes have multiple lenses, and a long ‘tongue’ that enables them to extract nectar from trumpet shaped flowers like the abelia.

Blue banded bees are one of a number of Australian native bees that can perform a special type of pollination called buzz pollination. This makes them ideal pollinators of crops such as tomatoes, kiwi fruit, eggplants and chilies. The honey bee, Apis mellifera, cannot buzz-pollinate.

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