Found August 1st 2010! Invasive bee on the island of Maui!

This bee is called "Ceratina smaragdula", a small carpenter bee that was introduced to Hawaii a few years ago. It's very close in size to the native bees, so it's potentially a serious competitor. It's widespread on the island of Oahu and was found on the Big Island in 2003. There were no records of this bee on Maui until I got these shots on August 1, 2010 at Oluwalu valley while I was looking for the "Hawaiian Yellow Faced Bee". Needless to say I never found them.

Special thanks to Karl Magnacca at UH for helping me to identify this bee.
His site: http://nature.berkeley.edu/~magnacca/