Bunco (noun): a swindle or confidence trick
The neon cuckoo bee is one of the prettiest of our native bees. The electric blue patches seem quite inappropriate for a sensible bee’s couture. That iridescent colour is the product of branched, furry hairs, not the insect’s exoskeleton.
I first spotted neon cuckoo bees in West Cooroy State Forest, which is now West Cooroy Conservation Park. But thanks to a constantly flowering basil bush, these extraordinary bees have become regular visitors to our home garden.
The adults are excellent pollinators, feeding on various flowers. However, the neon cuckoo bee is also a criminal of the bee world, which is why they are sometimes referred to as cloak-and-dagger bees. Just like avian cuckoos, they force other species to do the hard work of parenting. In the case of the neon cuckoo bee, it parasitises blue-banded bees.
Blue-banded bees make nest burrows in soft sandstone or clay. Each burrow will have a number of cells, and in each compartment the female parent deposits both an egg plus a stash of pollen. When the baby BBBs hatch, the larva feed on the pollen until they’re ready to metamorphose into their stripy-bottomed adult form.
The female neon cuckoo bee takes a keen interest in this process. She will watch blue-banded bees provisioning their nest burrows. When the BBB is off searching for more pollen, the neon cuckoo bee slips into the nest chamber and lays an egg of her own.
She doesn’t bother to remove the host egg, because her own egg is programmed to hatch quickly. When the blue-banded larva finally hatches, it finds itself sharing the cell with a large, well-fed neon cuckoo bee larva and no pollen. The young blue-banded bee simply dies of starvation while the neon cuckoo bee lives on to repeat the process.
There are other cuckoo bees in Australia, each of them specialists in preying on specific native bees. The domino cuckoo bee, which, as you’ve probably guessed, is black with white spots, parasitises the nests of teddy bear bees. We also get these big, fluffy Paddington Bear bees in our garden.
Australia has an estimated 1,600 species of native bee. Many have yet to be identified and named. But amongst the Apoidea, it’s a bee-eat-bee-larder world.
