Sweat bees are fairly common. We get two kinds here in my yard, neither of which are common enough to have common names, but which I see fairly frequently: Agapostemon splendens and Halictus poeyi. The “splendid” green Agapostemon moves very quickly; a good shot of it is fairly rare. But H. poeyi is a bit more sedate, allowing for some decent portraits. Here are a few.
From a post in 2012:
From bugguide.net, where I posted the pic to confirm the ID this fall:
And from this breezy morning, a rather cooperative individual letting me get the traditional profile shot and a “face shot”:
Hope you don’t mind sweating a little bit in the yard!
I’m growing some tomatoes in hydro containers in the yard and last week I saw about 3 small (what I thought) flys buzzing around the plants. When I looked closer I saw they looked like sweat bees but I didn’t think they were because they flew so fast, didn’t hover like the sweat bee’s I knew from the hay field, didn’t stop to sample my skin for sweat and they were bigger. But I thought ” It’s only three, what the heck.” Then this week there are a flock flying around the plants and none on these other plants belonging to a fellow apartment dweller, only 15 feet away. Now I’m thinking “Bad, bad, bad!”. But I looked them up and found out alot more than I ever knew about the common sweat bee. They are the Good guys here in Minnesota because I have hardly seen any European honey bees in the apple trees or lilacs and I have seen a steady decline in their numbers as well as butterflys, especially the Monarches that used to be so thick when I was a boy. I understand the chemical companies are required to quit producing the most harmful of insecticides by 2018 or so but I sure hope it is in time.