The Honey Bee

I think this is a male Apis mellifera. Hopefully I'm going to start remembering some of these latin names if I keep repeating them. The female looks slightly plumper than the male and I am only fairly certain that I have the correct ID.

There are just so many flies and wasps and bees. Each order of insects seems to have many sub-orders which so complicates things. Apparently the order of beetles (Coleoptera) has 300,000 different species. That they know of that is.

I've always liked the name Lupin Pooter, from the book Diary of a Nobody. I had no idea what pooter meant until today. Apparently, it's a suction device for sucking insects into a collection chamber, so that they may be examined.

I hope that helped. Or is that just me being pooteresque?