Native Bees: How to Help the At-Risk Pollinators
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home. Photography by Jennifer Bishop, unless otherwise indicated. “Native bees might not be buzzing now,” says Sarah Kornbluth, a field associate in Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. A female common eastern bumblebee with full pollen baskets (indentations on a bee’s rear legs that are covered in stiff hairs that trap pollen). Photograph by Steven Mlodinow. The brown-belted bumblebee is native to much of the U.S. Sweat Bees are small, docile, and great pollinators. They are also attracted to salt. Photograph courtesy of USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. “Fly eyes take up more than 75 percent of a fly’s head, while bee and wasp eyes take up less than 50 percent,” she says. “There is a shift toward being more mindful and ethical. We need to embrace the natural systems that we’ve just forgotten about.” Here’s what you can do at home. These tiny masked bees are solitary, nesting in twigs and stems. Not particularly hairy, they don’t carry pollen on their bodies, like other bees, but carry it in their “’crop,’ the upper part of the digestive tract.” This masked bee was spotted foraging on snakeroot in Bishop’s garden. Native insects coevolved with native plants. Grow native plants in your garden. “It may look good, but they won’t be able to eat it.” While nectar-eating insects are able to enjoy the sugary... ...calorie-rich nectar from a wide range of flowers, “pollen, which bees need to feed their young, is more likely to come from the local native species that they have been coevolving with them for many thousands of years,” says Kornbluth. Pesticides (and that includes insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides) don’t discriminate and will kill all insects—not just the ones you’re targeting. Male longhorn bees feature very long antennae. These bees are specialists of Asteraceae, and especially love sunflowers. Native bees nest in the ground and in stems and wood piles. “Do a small insect safari at home,” suggests Kornbluth. “The whole process is very eye-opening, engaging, and connecting.”