Can someone explain the birds and the bees to me? Or maybe just the bees?

Factual Questions
1

This afternoon I was in my back yard watching the bees go about their work of pollination and I noticed a strange behavior from a couple of the bees. Among the thousands of bees in my yard, several bees were not gathering nectar. In fact, they were not interested in the flowers at all. They would cruise around and around the garden looking for other bees. When another bee was found they would immediately jump it and perform what can only be described as… BEE SEX!!! When finished (roughly 5-10 seconds later), they would continue to cruise around looking for another bee. The jumped bee would then light a cigarette… No, scratch that. The jumped bee would then proceed with the gathering of nectar as if nothing ever happened.

More details: The cruising bees and the jumped bees were the same species (there seem to be about 4-5 different types of bees in my garden). The cruising bee is larger than the gathering bee. The bees look like a standard honey bee to me; they are not a type of “bumblebee.”

So what’s going on? Were they mating? I thought only the queen bee mated while the workers gathered nectar. Did the queen have a headache leading to the cruising bees going after whatever they could get? Was the queen slumming and collecting nectar?

2

I suspect you have been watching hoverflies - some of them look incredibly similar to honeybees.

Alternatively they may have been some kind of solitary bee species, which (as the name suggests) don’t have colonies, castes and the like, so the individual bees have to mate.

3

Hmmm, I never new that solitary bees existed. I thought all bees had hives and queens. Now with your answer and Google I’ve learned something new. Ain’t the SDMB great?

Thanks Mangetout!

4

You sure the rogue bees weren’t robbing the colony bees maybe?

But yeah, I saw these insects that LOOKED like bees but on closer inspection they were flies that had bee markings- the giveaway was they had fly-like heads with huge compound eyes.

5

For what it’s worth, hereis some pretty interesting reading about how honeybees mate. Somewhat similar to what you are seeing.