So how do you discover or ID a new bee species then?

Well, yeah, that's a interesting process.

So it starts when you collect a bee and you look at it in a microscope and you try to identify it.

And when you're identifying a bee, what you do is you look in the literature and you find a published key of species.

So the key of species is a work that someone else published that goes through, uh, character by character.

Like, it might ask questions like, "Is it densely punctate or sparsely punctate? Is it really hairy and fuzzy, or the, or is it mostly bald? Um, is the abdomen partially red or is it all black?" It asks a series of questions like that, and eventually you get to an answer and it'll tell you what species it is.

So that's, that's kind of the tool that people use to identify insects and, and most organisms actually.

Do you have any takeaways for home gardeners about sweat bees or about the, the collection in general?