Bug Wars

John,
Oh Boy, this is Cool . . .
The detail, the color, the subjects, Thanks for sharing.

Hi John You captured this fascinating scene perfectly Awesome detail and color
Albert Darmo

John, This is a fantastic shot with beautiful colors. Nice to capture both the ant and the bee together, and the details on the head and thorax of the bee are nice and clear. Would look great as a square crop, with most of the OOF stuff on the left cut off.

Yes, that is a bee, not a fly. It's in the order Hymenoptera, which includes wasps, bees, ants and similar insects, (but not flies, which only have a single pair of wings). This bee is in the family Halictidae, and the tribe Augochlorini. The tribe includes three genera: (Augochlora; Augochlorella; and Augochloropsis) all of which have species that are almost identical, so it's futile to ID a particular species unless you are an expert with a microscope and a key. As with many insects, the safest thing is to ID just down to the family level, so I just call them Halictids (sometimes called "sweat bees"). By the way, these are VERY similar-looking to "cuckoo wasps" so that can be confusing, too. There's a great article about them here: http://bugeric.blogspot.com/2010/05/metallica.html. Until I saw saw that blog post, I used to tell non-entomologists that the best thing to call a small metalic bee or wasp is "a sweat bee or cuckoo wasp." After reading the behavioral clues from that blog, you can pretty safely pin it down to one or the other.

Excellent capture, John. Interesting study of insect behavior, and, as others have noted, the detail in both the ant and the bee are remarkable. The colors are brilliant. My only minor suggestion would be to crop the left edge of the image to eliminate the somewhat distracting bright area in the LLC.

Two for one! Both nicely focused and it's an interesting frame.
I guess an alternate comp/crop would be a square format if you have the pixels as Wayne suggests.
But this works for me too.