UK Bee Species

Common Yellow-face Bee (Hylaeus communis)

Hylaeus communis Nylander, 1852 · subfamily Hylaeinae · family Colletidae

A bee that looks like a wasp

The common yellow-face bee is small, only about 5 to 7 mm long, with a slender, shiny black body that carries almost no hair.^[2] Across the face it has a neat pale yellow mask, more extensive in the males, and there are small yellow marks on the legs.^[2] With no furry coat and no obvious pollen baskets, it looks far more like a tiny black wasp than a bee, which is exactly why so many people never realise they are looking at one of the commonest bees in their garden.^[3]

The bee that swallows its pollen

Here is what makes this group so unusual. Almost all bees carry pollen externally, packed onto brushes of hair on the legs or belly. Yellow-face bees have no such brushes at all.^[3] Instead the female swallows both pollen and nectar, carrying them internally in her crop, or honey stomach, and regurgitates the mixture into her nest cells when she gets home.^[3] The lack of pollen brushes is the very reason these bees are so smooth and wasp-like. Like all members of the family Colletidae, they then line the cells with a thin, cellophane-like secretion.^[3][5]

Nesting in stems and old beetle holes

The common yellow-face bee is an opportunist that does not dig its own nest. Instead the female uses ready-made cavities of the right size: old beetle borings in dead wood, hollow and pithy plant stems such as bramble, and crevices in the mortar of walls.^[1] Inside, she builds a row of cellophane-lined cells, stocks each with the regurgitated pollen-and-nectar mix and lays an egg.^[1][3] Such nests are watched by their own specialist enemies, including the long-tailed wasp Gasteruption jaculator and the sapygid wasp Sapyga quinquepunctata, both of which have been reared from this bee's cells.^[1]

An everyday garden bee

This is one of the commonest yellow-face bees in southern Britain, frequent in gardens, parks, hedgerows and brownfield, though it becomes rare north of Yorkshire.^[1][2][4][6] It is a generalist, visiting a wide range of flowers for nectar and pollen, and is often seen on open, accessible blooms such as those of brambles and umbellifers.^[1] Adults fly from late May to September, peaking around July.^[2] Because it is small, dark and quick, it is easy to overlook, but on a sunny summer day a careful look at garden flowers will often turn one up.

Of the woods, and common

The genus name Hylaeus means "of the woods", a nod to these bees' habit of nesting in woody stems and old beetle holes, while communis is simply Latin for "common".^[7] The species was described by the Finnish naturalist William Nylander in 1852. Despite the wasp-like look, it is a true bee, one of the yellow-face or masked bees of the family Colletidae.^[7]

A bee that swallows its pollen

Most bees carry pollen on brushes of hair, on the legs or under the body. The yellow-face bees do something quite different: lacking any such brush, the female swallows pollen and nectar and carries them home inside her crop, then regurgitates the liquid mixture into the nest.^[8] Each cell is sealed inside a thin, waterproof, cellophane-like lining, the hallmark of the plasterer bees, which keeps the watery store safe from damp and mould.^[8] Carrying pollen internally is also why these bees are almost hairless, and so easily mistaken for small black wasps.^[8]

How to tell it apart

This is a tiny bee, around five to seven millimetres long, black and shining with neat pale-yellow marks on the face, more extensive in the males.^[9] It is probably the commonest of Britain's dozen or so yellow-face bees and a frequent visitor to gardens, though sure separation from its near relatives, such as the reed yellow-face bee, rests on fine details of the facial markings and the first abdominal segment.^[9]

Why the common yellow-face bee matters

The yellow-face bees are a reminder of how varied bees really are, and of how much pollination is done by small, unshowy species we rarely notice.^[3] Being a cavity-nester, this bee depends on exactly the things a tidy garden tends to remove: dead wood, hollow and pithy stems, and undisturbed crevices, alongside a long succession of flowers.^[1] Leaving some dead stems standing, letting bramble and other pithy stems remain, putting up a simple bee hotel and keeping flowers through the summer are all easy ways to help this little masked bee and the many other cavity-nesters that share its habits.

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Founder, HoneyBee & Co. · Guest Lecturer, University of Greenwich

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