Diario de cappaert

The obvious advantage of an interactive key is that just one character might get you close to an ID. You could diagnose Megachile pugnata or Halictus ligatus either by walking through a long set of traits--or get to species if you know about the projections from the cheek. A couple of Osmia shortcuts:

In DiscoverLife you use the "has" option in the menu, choosing Sparser centrally on frons, with stiff, thick, straight hairs above and below angled towards the center of the frons, forming a basket. This gets me to 3 possibles for Oregon (out of 96). The bad news is that when I then use the "difference" option for those three, only one of these (O. ednae: clypeus bulging) can be distiguished from the others. So you have to go to details beyond the key; however narrowing the Osmia list to 2 or 3 is huge (for me).

Even better, again using the "has" option and choosing Head, hypostomal area, hairs
Strongly curved, mostly restricted to a row along edge of hypostomal area nearest gena- Forming basket, I get to two choices (O. densa, O. clauca), distinguishable by hair color of the scopae and clypeus.

At the end of several rainless months, when fields are nearly devoid of flowers, you expect bees to be equally scarce. But I am seeing lots of bees on the few open flowers (Mentha, Lontodon(?), Madia). An occasional Apis or Ceratina. And lots of Lasioglossum. I collected a few dozen of these (large ones, olympiae? and dialictus), and they were invariably male.

What kind of sense does that make? The odds that any of the males I saw will mate on that day is zero. Do they wait around?

BTW, the dense and highly plumose clypeal hairs on the dialictus are striking. Presumably that is a dialictus male thing.