I must admit, I was scowling a bit, wondering why blow-flies might infest a mint bush, so I was surprised to see the cute little packages who were actually making all the noise: blue-banded bees!

An Australian native bee, Amegilla cingulate, are easy to identify by their turquoise and black striped abdomens, lush gold and white fluff, big green eyes, and crisp tan-coloured wings like layers of cellophane. And pay attention to the number of bands, male bees have five while females have only four.

While flying, they tuck their bottoms up and zip between flowers like tiny, antennae’d humming birds, so focused on their work, they hardly seem to notice human observers at all.

The loud buzz is their super-power in action. They are buzz-pollinators, that is, they use vibration to shake pollen from flowers, and it’s one of the reasons they are so good to have in your garden.

Recently, Australian tomato farmers proposed the importation of European bumble-bees (also buzz-pollinators) to enhance the productivity of their crops.

However, CSIRO suggested the blue-banded bee as an environmentally sensitive alternative and it was found that they are even more efficient at this job than their over-sized foreign competitors, raising tomato yield by up to 30 percent!

Unlike honey-bees, lady blue banded bees dig small individual burrows in clay banks. At night, after a full day foraging, they stay in their burrows to mind the babies while males – somewhat less solitary – congregate in communal roosts.

If you’d like to attract these little beauties to your garden, they love to visit lavender and bergamot; or you could use companion plantings of mints or basil with your tomatoes. Or, you could also try building nest-blocks as a species-specific bee-hotel.

Get some rectangular PVC downpipe and cut it into 14cm-long pieces. Stack the sections of PVC pipe into a storage cube with drainage holes and wedge them tightly. Then, take some fine, powdery clay or tennis-court loam and sieve, slowly adding water to a mixture like modeling clay. Fill each downpipe section with the clay, then before it’s dried completely, take a ball-point pen and add two starter holes about 5cm apart in each block. When the blocks have dried, take them from the storage cube and stack them hole-side out in a dry sheltered position that gets morning sun.

If the ladies like your work, you’ll soon have the enjoyment of watching these quirky little natives zipping around your garden.