Do you have pictures of bees?

How do you know when you have a taken a picture of a bee? If you don't have a handy field guide like one of the following:

...the next best thing to do is to post it up on the Bugguide.net website. There are hundreds, if not thousands of pictures posted there and taxonomists (people who know how to identify insects) who regularly visit the site look at the posts and comment with identifications. If you think you know what you have, it is also a great place to make a visual confirmation. Here is a screen shot of a page that I used recently to help confirm the identity of a bee specimen that I had never seen before:

Of course it is often difficult to determine what species of bee you have unless you collect it and can examine it under a microscope, comparing it with an interactive key like the one found at www.Discoverlife.org

Here is one of my favorite bee pictures - it is a Megachile species of some kind, commonly called a leafcutter bee:

Happy Bee Spotting!