plasterer bee

English
Colletes cunicularius

Noun

plasterer bee (plural plasterer bees)

  1. Any bee of the subfamily Colletinae, solitary bees that secrete a substance from their mouthparts to give a cellophane-like lining to their nests.
    • 1974, Karl von Frisch, Otto von Frisch, Animal Architecture, page 68:
      The plasterer bees, as we have seen, line the interior walls of their subterranean chambers with a waterproof wallpaper; others achieve a similar result by impregnating the cell walls with a glandular secretion or coating them with a waxy material.
    • 1989, Pamela Westland, Exploring Rural Greece, page 27:
      Plasterer bees build mud nests in the mouldings, butterflies brush the scenery with brilliant colour — lemon-yellow brimstones, dappled whites, large tortoiseshells and swallowtails are all there for the spotting.
    • 2002, Karl Weiss, The Little Book of Bees, page 48:
      Like masked bees, plasterer bees (Colletinae) line their rows of cells with a mixture of saliva and glandular secretion that hardens into a cellophane-like membrane. […] Each female plasterer bee fashions roughly ten brood cells separated by plaster-like walls and leaves a honey-pollen clump and one egg in every cell (see the bottom of Figure 5.1).

Synonyms

Hypernyms
  • (solitary bee): colletid (bee of family Colletidae)

Further reading
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