Eulaema cingulata, m, right
The Not so Colorful Orchid Bee (but yet very large). Eulaema cingulata. Plenty of the Orchid Bee clade are over the top in their green glossy fair-thee-well metallic sorts of way. But, Eulaema ...;No. They are fur-bodied with small finishes or notes of metallic tucked into non-obvious places. The males do pack the usual scent holsters ready for charging with orchid based perfumes (check the legs out in these shots and figure that out on your own). (Time for a Side Bar: Perfumators have a lush and long list of words to describe scents (I, for example, prefer the exotic and overpowering intoxication of gasoline and bar oil which is both languid and beguiling) and would, in the case of orchid bees, love to have the volatiles gathered by the males analyzed through the noses of perfumators (rather than chemists.)..could be some nice new scents developed (though, actually, you couldn't wear these scents in tropical Americas (though this would be the most indiginously obvious place to wear them) because the wearer would soon be covered in orchid bees; fine if they were metallic green orchid bees, but not if they were like Eulaemas (this is perhaps too judgmental on my part)) I could go on. This bee collected by the native bee convert Tim McMahon in Costa Rica. Photo by Elizabeth Panner who is generally getting better, but did cut the nose off one of these shots.
We Are Made One with What We Touch and See
We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.
- Oscar Wilde. Original public domain image from Flickr