Sweat bee

Insects can be extremely difficult to ID. For instance, as you may know, some dragonflies are easy to figure out. But some closely related species require the insect to be inhand and their claspers to be examined by handlens for definitive ID. In damselflies even dissection of the subject and a microscope may be necessary to determine ID to species level. Nonetheless, it is a wonderful puzzle to attempt and your photo is very good of a very pretty insect.

Thanks, all. Gordon, I can't for the life of me figure it out (harder even than the tiny shore birds and sparrows). And I do love the minutiae.

very cool!

That Bee is a beauty.

For an ID, I'd suggest looking at the metallic sweat bees, probably in the genus Agapostemon. See this page for more information: http://bugguide.net/node/view/7997/bgima.... There are many sweat bee species and lots of them look very similar. Perhaps you may want to label the sighting simply as Sweat Bee and list the scientific name as "genus: Agapostemon. If you want to see how difficult it is determine to the species level, see the discussion at http://bugguide.net/node/view/478729/bgi... and other pages. Very nice photos by the way. Macro work is a lot of fun and you never run out of subjects.