After we’d paid our camping fees to the Kennedy Range NP camp host Brett, he handed me a large insect, curled up dead in a small ball, around the size of a man’s thumb.
‘This is what we’re famous for.’
I looked back at the incredible mountain range – Mundatharrda to the Traditional Owners – glowing ochre in the setting sun and was a little sceptical.
‘It’s a burrowing bee. They’re doing their thing at the moment at the claypan out near the gate. You can keep that one.’
So in the heat and unsettled wind the next day we to the edge of the claypan, dotted with holes and huge bees with big bulbous bottoms flying just above the surface and madly diving into the holes.
Then a much paler female emerged from a burrow was set upon and fought over by three or four males, and they tumbled over and over in a large ball of bee, across the ochre coloured claypan.
We pieced together their full life story later – adults of these Dawson’s Burrowing Bees only occur in the northwest in the winter months when their forage plants are in bloom. For the rest of the year they lie dormant underground.
To quote the Museum brochure: ‘Males play no part in nest building and provisioning and serve only to ensure that all females are fertilised.’
‘Competition for females at emergence holes is fierce and a female venturing out may be instantly enveloped in a buzzing, tumbling ball of males.’ Which is definitely what we saw.
The life cycle gets even weirder. After the female has made the nest, she waterproofs it with wax, then half fills it with nectar and pollen, laying an egg on top and then caps the next. She might do this multiple times in the same hole, sealing it with a mud plug, and then often dying of exhaustion.
The eggs soon hatch and the larvae consume the liquid food they float in, they grow rapidly, shit and spread the faecel matter around the walls. Then they lie dormant, transforming into pupa then adult, all still in the nest. Then the next winter, they gnaw through the cap and burrow to the surface. And the process begins all over again, and the life of the Dawson’s burrowing bee goes on.
