Back in the C19th it was fashionable to believe that you could tell what kind of personality someone had, or how they might behave, by looking at their facial features (physiognomy) and measuring their skull (phrenology). An Italian professor of psychiatry and anthropology called Cesare Lombroso took this pseudoscience a stage further, proposing that criminal tendencies were inherited, and revealed themselves in certain physical characteristics which were therefore predictive of criminal behaviour. This theory became wildly popular for a while, and Lombroso is sometimes called “the father of criminology”, but over time the idea of the born criminal fell out of favour, and today Lombroso’s writing, which is heavily laced with misogyny and with racial prejudice and stereotyping, makes uncomfortable reading. Still though, I sometimes find myself catching sight of someone in the street and thinking Probably best avoided. I’m not proud of myself for making snap judgements in this way, but that doesn’t mean I won’t give that person a wide berth. Better safe than sorry.
All of which rambling brings me on to the bee of the day, whose strange and saturnine appearance has always seemed to me to betray its criminal tendencies. Melecta albifrons is a cleptoparasite of my beloved hairy-footed flower bees: the female searches out an unguarded Anthophora plumipes nest and lays her eggs inside it, and when they hatch the larvae eat both the host eggs and the food stores left by the plumpie mother for her young. I try not to get too anthropomorphic about this behaviour, because while obviously it’s disastrous for the DNA line of any individual bee who’s targeted, in population terms the presence of a small number of Melecta albifrons in an area has no observable effect on Anthophora plumipes numbers. And I confess that I even get a little frisson of excitement when I spot the first Melecta of the year. But still, I popped over to the pulmonaria after taking this photo, and said to the female plumpies, “On guard, ladies! Mourning bee alert!”.
I have two colour strains of M. albifrons in my garden, and I found one specimen of each type this afternoon. The other had the striking black, grey and white colouration that’s common in this species, and would have made a good photo on the deep pink crab apple blossom from which it was feeding if it had only stood still for a split second. But it didn’t. This dark form is less common, though far from unusual; according to Falk it’s not unknown for individuals to be entirely black, with no white patches on the abdomen and legs. Males such as this specimen are smaller and slimmer than the females, which tend to look as though they’ve been inflated.
