Females are commonly about 3–6 mm long.
Fine-art photographic collection
Lasioglossum morio
A metallic-green bee only a few millimetres long that can organise a miniature worker society underground.
About this species
Lasioglossum morio(Fabricius, 1793)
Information reviewed15 July 2026
Lasioglossum morio is a tiny dark metallic furrow bee with a broad Palearctic range. Females excavate nests in bare or lightly vegetated soil, and many populations show a primitively eusocial cycle in which a foundress produces a worker brood before a later reproductive brood.
Taxonomy
Animalia · Arthropoda · Insecta · Hymenoptera · Halictidae · Lasioglossum
Accepted taxon. · checked 2026-07-15
Europe, North Africa and western to central AsiaBroad range and selected reference localities — not a complete occurrence map.
Europe, North Africa and western to central Asia
Warm banks, paths, quarries, gardens and other places with exposed or sparsely vegetated soil.
Females may be active from early spring into autumn; males appear later in the season.
Adults collect nectar and pollen from a wide variety of flowers.
Usually primitively eusocial, although social expression can vary with climate and locality.
What makes this species remarkable?
A spring foundress can raise undersized daughters that work for the nest while she remains the principal egg-layer — one of the simplest forms of eusociality.
At only a few millimetres long, females may remain on the wing from March into October, giving this minute bee an unusually long visible season.
Large nesting aggregations can pack many separate family nests into the same patch of bare ground without merging them into one colony.