The other bees: America's overlooked wild pollinators and the fight to save them

When most of us picture a bee, we see a honeybee, busy in its hive and making honey. Yet that familiar insect is only one of thousands of kinds of bees, and it is not even native to North America. Hidden all around us lives a vast, mostly overlooked world of wild native bees.

A hidden world of wild bees

The United States is home to more than four thousand species of native bees. The great majority of them are solitary, living not in a colony but as single females who dig their own nests. Among them are mining bees, leafcutter bees, mason bees, sweat bees and the familiar, fuzzy bumble bees of our gardens.

They come in an astonishing range of shapes and sizes, from insects smaller than a grain of rice to plump bumble bees. Some tunnel into the ground, others nest in hollow stems or old wood. Most are gentle and rarely sting, since a lone female has no hive to defend and little reason to attack.

Better pollinators than the honeybee

These wild bees are not just a curiosity. Native bees often pollinate wild plants and crops more effectively than the introduced honeybee, and about a third of the food grown in the United States, from blueberries to tomatoes, depends in part on the work that they do.

Some of that work only wild bees can do. Bumble bees, for instance, use a trick called buzz pollination, vibrating their bodies to shake stubborn pollen loose from flowers like tomatoes and blueberries, something the domesticated honeybee simply cannot manage at all.

A quiet crisis

The trouble is that many of these four thousand species are quietly slipping away. Across North America, wild bees are declining under the combined weight of habitat loss, intensive farming, pesticides, disease, invasive species and an increasingly unstable climate.

The most famous casualty is the rusty patched bumble bee, once common across the east and the midwest. In 2017 it became the first bumble bee in the country to be listed as endangered, after its numbers crashed by around eighty seven percent, leaving only small, scattered populations behind.

Why they are vanishing

The reasons are tangled but familiar. Sprawling monoculture fields leave little to eat, tidy landscapes offer few places to nest, and widely used pesticides can poison bees outright or leave them weakened and disoriented. Introduced diseases have only made matters worse.

There is also a common misunderstanding. Many people think that saving the bees means keeping honeybees, yet the honeybee is essentially a managed farm animal. The real emergency is unfolding among the wild native bees, which have no beekeeper to look after them at all.

What helps the wild bees

The good news is that helping them is surprisingly simple. Planting native flowers that bloom from spring to fall, leaving a patch of bare soil or a few hollow stems for nesting, and setting out a simple bee house can turn almost any yard into a haven for wild bees.

Just as important is what we leave out. Avoiding pesticides, mowing less often and letting a corner of the garden grow a little wild all give native bees the food and shelter they need. Small changes, repeated across millions of yards, can add up remarkably fast.

Why it matters

The stakes reach far beyond the garden. Roughly nine in ten wild plants and three quarters of our leading food crops depend on animal pollinators, and bees do the lion's share of that quiet labor. To lose our wild bees would be to slowly unravel the very web that feeds us.

The bees at our feet

What gives me hope is that these creatures are still all around us, waiting to be noticed. A bare bank buzzing with mining bees or a bumble bee working a patch of clover is a small sign that the wild world is quietly holding on, right here at our feet.

On my weekend walks along muddy trails, I have started watching for them, and now I see wild bees everywhere I look. They remind me that protecting nature does not always mean some far off wilderness, but often begins with the humble, hardworking lives buzzing in our own backyards.