Image Credit: gbohne
Petal-plucking Bees (Megachilidae: Megachile (subgenus Chalicodoma)
These bees are close relatives of the more typical leaf-cutting bees. They are extremely diverse in the tropics of the world, with only 2 species in the PNW though. They differ from the typical leaf-cutting bees because they pluck the petals from flowers for their wallpaper. Chalicodoma have mandibles without cutting edges, only grabbing points. The other Megachile have a diverse set of mandible types with 1-3 cutting edges per mandible (crucial for their identification, but not always that obvious to see with only a hand lens). One of our species is probably the major pollinator of bird’s-beak (Cordylanthus); it presumably gathers its petals from different species of plants.