Yellow-faced Bee

They are tiny, approx. 1/4" (5-6 cm) long. Abdomen is wasp-like, with minimal hair. Coloring is black with yellow on the face, tibiae and pronotum. The wings are smokey colored and have reddish-brown veining. It appears it doesn't have pollen collecting brushes. It lives in meadows and abandon crop fields. It generally has brood cells in the pith of stems, such as Sumac. At times it appears to brood in soil, using old tunnels. They line the cells with a silk-like secretion and add pollen to the cell for the larvae.

I discovered these tiny bees in my window boxes last year. I looked them up and discovered they were Yellow-faced Bees(Hylaeus modestus). One landed on my fingertip and just sat there looking at me. I must have decided I wasn't a threat and it buzzed off to it's b... read moreurrow. I could walk right up to the window boxes, even water them and they didn't care. They'd just fly up above the boxes and swarm about, when I was done watering they would fly back to their burrows.