In the forests of Turkey and Iran, a tiny bee creates something astonishing: nests made from flower petals.

Meet the Osmia avosetta, a rare species of solitary bee that lines her underground nursery chambers with delicate layers of pink, purple, or yellow petals. Each one is carefully gathered, shaped, and glued together with mud.

Each nest is about the size of a jellybean and holds one egg. The mother bee packs in a ball of pollen and nectar for her future offspring, seals the chamber with more petals, and moves on to build the next. These artistic nurseries stay hidden just below the surface of soft soil. The baby bee develops underground for months and usually emerges the next spring.

Osmia avosetta works alone with no hive and no colony, and she has only a few short weeks to complete her life's work before her time runs out. But her floral creations remain underground, waiting to bloom in a different way: as the next generation of bees.

Much of what we know about Osmia avosetta comes from the work of entomologist Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History, who helped document and publish the discovery of these remarkable petal-building bees. Native to Southwest Asia, the species was first identified in Turkey, and has since been observed in Iran, Syria, and Jordan.