Showing some love to our native bees

There are so many of them and they're all so different.

That's a Pure Green Sweat Bee.

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Augochlora pura is a solitary sweat bee found primarily in the Eastern United States. It is known for its bright green color and its tendency to forage on a variety of plants. Inhabiting rotting logs, this bee can produce up to three generations per year. Both males and females have been observed licking sweat from human skin, most likely seeking salt

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Looks too much like a yellow jacket. It would have to die.

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That is a Black and Yellow Nomad Bee, and I held the flower just below it to get a decent pic because the wind was blowing. It paid me no mind. They're sometimes called cuckoo (like the bird) bees because they are nest parasitoids, targeting the nests of other solitary ground bees. They mainly just target a couple of distinct species. They invade the ground nests and lay their egg inside the egg of the other bee. The nomad bee hatches before the other bee, and consumes it and the provisions left for it.

Everything has a check in Nature, even bees.

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The other amazing thing is all the different pollinating wasps and moths.

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There are so many wasp species, and they're hard to identify. I'm at somewhere between forty or fifty species verified(ish) around my place. Even in this part of the world there are a bunch of species that haven't been identified or described yet, so trying to figure out what they are is pretty much impossible.

I'm at over 130 moth species now.

I use iNaturalist mostly. Sometimes I use Bugguide.net because those people really know their stuff. iNat can get you close on most things if you take a minute or two to really compare.