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A friend took this photo of a bee in his back yard in central Utah (© Jon Mott, CC-BY 3.0). I have no formal training in systematics or entomology, so to me everything looks like the bees' poster child Apis mellifera. Can someone with a bit more experience confirm or refute this?

honey drinker

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  • $\begingroup$ Maybe You should contact a local apiary and ask them about common bees in your are. $\endgroup$
    – YAHB
    Jun 29, 2015 at 15:43

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Yes, this looks like Apis mellifera, which is also one of the most common bees you'll run into. If you have other pictures, you could check the identification tips at the bugguide page for the species.

As a side note, in general to really confirm an identification a specialist would need to see a collected specimen (that is, a live or pinned bee) as the distinctive characters (things like size, wing veins, or in this case, long hairs on the eye) may not be visible in photographs.

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