Morning time on a pleasant temperature summer day, I was watching the cloud of buzzing insects around flowering coffee trees (Coffea sp.) while others were harvesting grapes beside me. Like so many times before, I tried to count how many different insect taxa I could identify around the flowers. I did not have to work hard because it looked like that around the coffee trees the strong, extraordinarily sweet scent attracted all the pollinators of the area. In addition to the many well-known bees and flies, I saw a new (for me) hoverfly species (brown-toed forest fly, Xylota segnis) and a rarely seen potter wasp from the Ancistrocerus genus (it was probably the Ancistrocerus gazella). Moreover, plenty of little sweat bees (Lasioglossum sp.) and honey bees (Apis mellifera) were humming around the blindingly white petals, accompanied by a lot of different fly species, such as the locust blowfly (Stomorhina lunata), the common European greenbottle (Lucilia sericata), the blue blowfly (Calliphora vicina), the stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans), a tiny one of the tiger flies (Coenosia sp.). Last but not least, Sepsis and Musca flies were also swarming for the flowers. Unfortunately, I did not have time to take nice photos because I concentrated on documenting all species. Later, I joined the others and took part in the harvest work, and the bees and flies continued the foraging and the feeding as if I had never been there.
Check out the busy sweat bees (Lasioglossum sp.) feeding on coffee flowers in the video linked below.
