Had bees emerging inside my house yesterday.

[Harley Craig]

As I was watching tv I noticed something hitting the window on the inside trying to get out. At first I thought it was one of those Asian Lady Bug's but then I saw 2...then 4.... then finally went over and realized 6 bees were trying to get out the window, at first I thought they were young small cell bees which I have a few hives with small cell, but when I looked down I saw a tiny pile of dried mud on the floor near my cut off saw I had brought into the house a few weeks ago from the shed for a little re-modeling project I have been working on. That is when I realized some sort of solitary mason type bee had used one of the screw holes in the base of the saw and being warm for the last two week they were emerging. LOL

What sort of solitary bee looks exactly like a tiny honey bee?

[Hops Brewster]

hard to tell without seeing them, but leaf cutters look to me like 1/3 - 1/2 size honey bees.

[FlowerPlanter]

>What sort of solitary bee looks exactly like a tiny honey bee?

Hundreds of species of mason and orchard bees. We have one about the same size as honey bees just a little darker.

[Lburou]

Harley, can you feed them until the temps outside are tolerable for those bees?

[Utahbee]

I think you are seeing Japanese hornfaced bees, Osmia cornifrons. The fact that they emerged through mud capped nests indicates that they are mason bees. Leafcutter bees overwinter as larvae and require substantial warming (and time) in order to complete their development before they emerge. Mason bees go into winter as fully-formed adults and require far less warming to bring them out in the spring, assuming they accumulated enough chilling units before hand. Japanese hornfaced bees have been established in the wild in Indiana for over 15 years so I'm sure they are naturalized in Illinois as well.

[BadBeeKeeper]

I noticed something hitting the window on the inside trying to get out...went over and realized 6 bees were trying to get out the window...when I looked down I saw a tiny pile of dried mud on the floor near my cut off saw I had brought into the house a few weeks ago from the shed for a little re-modeling project I have been working on. That is when I realized some sort of solitary mason type bee had used one of the screw holes in the base of the saw and being warm for the last two week they were emerging. LOL

I've got tons of little buggers like that here. I kept finding tools and torches and basically anything with a hole or passage full of mud. At first, I thought that I must have been careless and dropped stuff in the mud and didn't remember, I was cussing at myself, but then I started finding mud in places I knew had never been near mud, like a coil of fuel-line hose. They are a terrible nuisance here. I had a whole bunch of frame top and bottom bars stacked in nice, neat piles waiting for time and need to be assembled...and when the time came, they were all stuck together- the grooves in the bars were packed with mud and larvae...and that's when it dawned on me why I was finding mud in everything...

Some people actually build nesting blocks- chunks of wood with holes drilled in, to encourage them ('save' the bees). I thought about doing that so that they would be diverted from packing in stuff where I don't want them, but then I wonder if I won't be compounding the problem by making even -more- of the little buggers.

[Harley Craig]

They are a terrible nuisance here..

not so much a nuisance here, except when i pulled my crown stapler off the bench and brought it in to work on trim, it wouldn't work thought it froze up or rusted internally.....that is when I realized the air port was backed with mud.......that did suck.

[Michael Bush]

Leaf cutters pretty much look like a tiny carniolan...

[1102009]

I don´t know if you have the same species but this is a nice link:

http://www.wildbienen.info/steckbrie...ia_cornuta.php

Sorry about the language but nice pictures.
I built all my breeding places with the help of this link.

[aunt betty]

These? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halictidae