Finding the Unseen Bees: Take Action This World Bee Day (Ep. 77)

World Bee Day on May 20 is a highlight on The Bee’s Knees calendar—a moment to celebrate the pollinators who keep our ecosystems and food systems thriving. This year, we’re buzzing in on a group of bees that rarely get the spotlight but absolutely deserve it: ground‑nesting bees.

These bees are anything but minor players. In fact, they make up roughly 70% of all solitary bee species. Their early spring activity makes them essential pollinators for crops like cherries, apples, and blueberries. And their underground burrows do more than house their young; they naturally aerate the soil, acting as tiny ecosystem engineers.

They’re also gentle, non‑aggressive, and endlessly fascinating to watch. Yet despite their ecological importance, their nests are easy to overlook and even easier to disturb. That makes understanding where and how they live a crucial piece of the conservation puzzle.

Enter Dr. Jordan Kueneman and his team, who launched GNBee, a global community science project dedicated to raising awareness of ground‑nesting bees and gathering the data needed to protect them. Using iNaturalist—an app that helps people identify plants and animals while contributing to scientific research—GNBee invites anyone, anywhere, to photograph bees and map their nesting sites. The project has its own dedicated page on the app, making it simple to join and start contributing.

Every observation helps researchers track bee populations, understand habitat needs, and inform conservation decisions. It’s a powerful reminder that protecting pollinators isn’t just about planting flowers—it’s also about paying attention to the hidden lives beneath our feet.

Dr. Jordan Kueneman is a researcher at Cornell University in the United States. His research interests include eco-evolutionary interactions and conservation management. You can learn more about the scientific end of GNBee through this paper and check out the project’s YouTube channel for more bee videos.

Good to know

Wondering how to get good, useful photos of ground-nesting bees? Jordan has a simple step-by-step guide to getting started on iNaturalist. For the most helpful observations, take a photo of a ground-nesting bee and its nest entrance, ideally showing the bee entering or exiting the nest.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees. A podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.

Happy world Bee Day. The United Nations declared May 20th, world Bee Day to recognize the important role bees and other pollinators play in keeping people and the planet healthy and to acknowledge the growing challenges they face. Today we’re celebrating with a story and a mission.

Most of the world’s bee species, 70% actually are solitary ground nesting and almost entirely overlooked, but they’re doing an enormous share of the pollination that keeps ecosystems resilient and our [00:01:00] food systems functioning.

The challenge is we often don’t even know where they live. Their nests are small, subtle, and easy to miss. Unless you know what to look for, that’s where today’s guest comes in. Dr. Jordan Kueneman and his team have launched a global community science project to map nesting aggregations of solitary ground nesting bees.

It’s called GNBee, and it empowers anyone with a camera and a bit of curiosity to contribute real data. Data that supports researchers, guides conservation decisions. And protects the bees that rarely get the spotlight. So in honor of World Bee Day and in the spirit of our season four, bee a hero theme, we’re going underground to see how each of us can take meaningful action right in our own neighborhoods.

This is about noticing, documenting, and celebrating the incredible diversity of bees that share our landscapes. Let’s talk to Jordan. [00:02:00] So your work highlights how overlooked solitary ground nesting bees are, despite their huge ecological importance. What first motivated you to launch a global community science project to map their nesting sites?

And why is this gap in knowledge so critical to fill now? So what motivated me? To launch this project was really my experience visiting such amazing aggregation sites. So to put this into a little bit of context in how I got to this place, you know, I originally started working in the brood microbiome of the pollen provisions of solitary bees.

’cause I was trying to place their microbial ecology into the broader context of bee Research, which had been heavily focused on social bees. So we were interested in the brute cell microbiome because these are the pollen provisions and the nectar that get stored from the mother for the next generation.
And it’s really the only interaction that they have with their parents, right? Because there’s no parental care. So it’s just information [00:03:00] is passed on through the food resources and chemicals that are left behind that they eat and they develop with. And it’s the critical point, right? So if the wrong mixture of nutrients and microbes and.

are put into that brood cell, then the bee would fail to develop. And so that’s just like this essential link between generations, right? And so I was interested in studying that component. And in order to do that effectively, basically I needed to find locations where I could get multiple brood cell pollen provisions at a single time point.

At a single stage, which was like where there was an egg on it, but it hadn’t already been consumed by the larvae. And so to do that, you needed to find an aggregation of bees that you could carefully excavate and get these, you know, discreet little packets, um, the biological information. And so to accomplish that aim, I had to communicate with researchers.

People all over the place trying to track down where they had found bees [00:04:00] when they were active, you know, and this was a guess, right? Because you wanted to come back the next year and sample them at that specific time. And it just became very obvious that there was this missing knowledge gap about where bees were in the landscape, where to find them, how to study them.
And so that alongside this experience of visiting these really incredible biological events. You know, really energized me and spurred me on to study these ground nesting bees. So you are using iNaturalist to crowdsource nest site observations from all over the world? Yeah. Uh, what kinds of data are everyday people, like not researchers, like you actually contributing and how does that information directly support researchers like you and conservation planning?

Right. So it’s a mix, right? So your average person probably, uh, that is making an observation will start with a simple photo of a bee near a nest entrance and ask, what is [00:05:00] this? Right? But you get the whole spectrum. So we’re communicating to people what we’re hoping to get from these types of observations.

And so we get. You know, a very basic observation to a very detailed observation. So we get the whole spread. And sometimes, you know, and maybe not that surprising, that people are making observations that are unique behavioral observations that to that species that haven’t been observed elsewhere. And this is just because there’s a lot of knowledge, you know, that we can learn by observing these bees doing what they’re doing, especially in the context of a nesting aggregation.
So a nesting aggregation, you might ask, you know, really what is that? And it’s a localized area where many individuals and sometimes species are using similar soils and substrates. So they’re all nesting in like the same location. They don’t have hives ’cause there’s, again, they’re solitary. But because they like the site and it worked for them previously, many of them will nest next to where they were born.

Um, something might be [00:06:00] described as Natal fiat. So it’s that like, you know, sea turtles and, you know, sharks that are breeding on little sea mounts and you know, the Albatros Islands where they all, you know, they nest in the same place every year. Right. Because it’s the only place that they can find to nest maybe.

But it’s a successful place. What happens is if it’s a good quality nesting habitat, those bees can exist there for decades to centuries. And we don’t really know what the upper limits are, but we are finding these locations that can support millions of bees. And do you have any examples that you could share, um, about information that you or your team have gotten from iNaturalist that’s kind of made a difference?

Or made you think about something differently? Yeah. Well, um, I mean there’s a lot of sort of these anecdotal right observations that we need to follow up on. Uh, but I think what really is striking to me is when we find these unique spots, I mean, I just want to go [00:07:00] back to, you know, a little bit of the description of these sort of larger aggregation sites because they kind of blow you away.

Not only are they just like remarkable events to witness, but maybe I can put it into some perspective here a little bit. So one of the aggregations that we found locally, which is probably now the second largest recorded aggregation, even though we know there’s gonna be many more that are bigger. You know, hosts around 5.5 million andreis that emerge every spring within a two week window, and are the primary pollinators of like apple crops and everything that’s near us.

So when we weighed those out, you know, we weighed a few bees and you know, we extrapolate out, you know, you’re, it’s around 250 honeybee colonies. Just there naturally occurring. Right. And we were kind of joking around. It’s like, well this, you know, large herbivores, so. I guess that equates to around four bison and one wooly mammoth.

So, [00:08:00] so I just think that, you know, people just basically uncovering, uh, you know, a mammoth sized aggregation that are, you know, pollinators. They’re, they’re bringing all this pollen also back into the soil and nutrify the soil and just creating this incredible dynamic for a lot of other species that sometimes some of them are rooting them up to eat them.

Some of them are parasitizing them, you know. Creating this incredible ecological system right where they have decided to aggregate. I really feel like that to me is one of the coolest parts of the observations, is putting a scale to some of these spots. But then again, there’s also discovery of rare species, like, oh, this is, you know, it is only one or two, but we haven’t found them anywhere else.
So it can be all sorts of unique discoveries. So for someone listening on World Bee Day who wants to help, what are the simplest steps they could take to find, recognize, and safely document ground nesting bee aggregations in their own area? Yeah, so the [00:09:00] first thing I would say is that because ground nesting bees, again, we’re talking about solitary ground-nesting bees .

Not social grounding bee, which aren’t all that common, but do occur. You know, they’re not guarding any central resource. There’s no real defense that they’re trying to, you know, put up, right? So they’re very gentle. Like you can walk through them, you can sit on the grass, you can observe them as close as you want.

I could share a video or whatever. You can hold them in your hands. You know, they’re, the bees that we’re largely talking about are very gentle, especially if you’re not squeezing them. And so then that takes away any fear, you know, if you know what you’re looking at, that you might have, just because of the misconceptions around, uh, solitary bees and the larger misconceptions around ground bees, which are typically.

People are thinking about ground nesting social wasps, which do stay away from, right? So if you’re seeing many individuals go in and out of one entrance. That’s a social bee or social wasp, and you don’t, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking [00:10:00] about, you know, a single mother digging, an individual tumulus that goes down and provisioning individual brood cells for their offspring.

So it’s very different biology and easy to distinguish. So the question that you first started with was, you know, what can somebody do to contribute and make, contribute to bee conservation or bee knowledge? In their area. And one thing I would say is get a feel for what we’re talking about and what we’re looking at.

So maybe visit the i, the ground nesting bee iNaturalist project. Look at what is occurring in your area. Look specifically at when those bees are active, because some bees are active in the spring, some bees are active in the summer, often their above ground activity is only a few weeks. So you want to, you know, take those two pieces of information together.

And go visit a site and make an observation of that site. You know, experience it, you know, if it’s a big site, bring a lawn chair and just hang out. You know? But you might also be playing detective and finding where was this [00:11:00] thing where, you know, where did somebody report it? Why didn’t they make the, you know, the location accuracy higher, right?

So things that we have, you’ll start to learn a little bit on the research side, things that are challenges that do occur. But that’s where I would say start, you know, go observe them. Find a spot that’s close, you know, go try to locate like you’re a detective, figure out where it is, and then work on some photography.

’cause it can be very challenging to get a in focus photo of a bee ’cause they don’t always sit still and put those photos. Do a series in context so I can share a little plate with your audience and I can pass it along to you. But it’s very helpful to get a photo of the area where the bees are nesting of a more closeup of the bees.

Nesting entrances. ’cause that tells us a bit about their biology and what they’re doing. There’s also, you know, ideally a bee entering and exiting. So you know for sure that it’s using that and you’re not mistaking it for something else like a wormhole. But then for the bee itself, you know, the closeup of the head, [00:12:00] the venetians in the wing, the abdomen, and the, you can give us information that gets us closer to being able to identify the species.

And that’s like the first photo documentary step. And from there there’s a lot of places we can take it. So once these nesting hotspots are mapped, how can land managers or policy makers, or even communities use the information to kind of protect and restore the habitat for the solitary ground nesting bees?

Yeah, so I think the first step is really protecting what we find, and this happens. It’s actually really remarkable. I mean, I was hoping this would happen and it’s so heartwarming to see this happen, but we get feedback from our participants and what I call our bee ambassadors about how learning about their aggregation gave them, uh, greater, basically drive to communicate what they’ve found to their neighbors and to people that might be involved in land [00:13:00] management, and especially having ties to a research project.

Kind of contextualizes it. So they’re getting, uh, feedback, they’re getting support and sort of understanding what they’re seeing and it. And their observations will and do tie into descriptive studies and predictive studies and everything that we’re trying to do to learn about where bees nest and why and how to keep them there long term.

So that sort of empowerment, you know, allows people to act locally, which is what it really takes. And, you know, talk to their neighbors about, Hey, you know, this is what we’re seeing here. It’s not only in my yard, right? You have a little in your yard. But this is what it is and this is actually can be a good thing.

And so we see a lot of people, you know that that’s the level of protective engagement is just communicating to the people around them that use the space, that are aware about the value of. You know, bee diversity and that, you know, maintaining bee diversity means maintaining places where that they can nest.

And so, so that happens. And [00:14:00] then we get a lot of feedback from, you know, universities, cemeteries, park managers that are, um, that we’ve, you know, reached out to their, um, communications folks. They’re always very enthused because it gives them something to show off, right? So say you’ve got a land trust and people are visiting the trails, it’s always nice if you can describe the biology you’re seeing, or put something out that draws people attention, gives them a little bit more engagement, especially if they’re walking the same trail that they’ve walked for 20 years.

And so it’s about, you know, educating people, giving them something a little bit more depth to their experience wherever they are. And so we’ve had people that are like, well, well, the groundskeepers have been upset about, you know, the soil turnover and the grass doesn’t look good in April when we need to take these photos.

It’s like, but wait, you know, this is a very cool observation area. This is a very important pollinator resource, and you’re an education institution that should take [00:15:00] advantage of this and also value it, right? So part of your greater missions often include sustainability and, you know, taking care of the environment.

Right? Well, here’s your opportunity. So we get that. And then even today I got a, a letter from a bee ambassador that they were writing, uh, to the engineering and capital Projects development program because they were doing some land management work. And I’ve yet to know exactly what they’re doing, but I think actually moving Earth around in order to change the floodplain of this area.
And there’s a very sensitive bee species nesting in a large aggregation, uniquely in that spot. And we don’t know of any others. So they’re, you know, leveraging this work and our connections, uh, in order to make the case that, hey, you know, we actually should also prioritize these, um, bees in this area. So it’s pretty dynamic.

So in all your time working with bees, has there been a discovery or some other part of your work that made you feel like a bee [00:16:00] hero? You were really making a difference. I don’t know if I could bring myself to be a, a hero, at least not yet. But there’s a few things like working in the tropics, you get to observe bee biology that’s new that maybe no one has seen.

Like for example, I made these observations of this cordyceps uh, fungus infecting stingless bees, which has never been observed. So that seemed kind of just fascinating to me. We were, you know, discovering new species in Ecuador, so that was, you know, just some fascinating work as well. And then here locally, it’s just kind of bringing all these and in the ground nesting bee work.

Like it’s bringing all this together, like I feel like it’s culminating right to, we’re bringing a lot of data together now and intend to do so long term in order to. Fill in these much larger knowledge gaps of how to bees select appropriate nesting place in the environment. So maybe not a hero, but working towards, uh, [00:17:00] fillings in some important knowledge gaps.

Talking with Jordan really brings home how much is happening right under our feet, and how much of that story we’ve been missing. And if today’s conversation sparked your curiosity, you’re in good company. There’s a whole world of solitary ground nesting bees out there waiting to be seen, understood, and protected, and you can be part of that effort.

Jordan mentioned a lot of resources and we’ve rounded them up on the website, the Bees Knees website. Head over there to find a link to GNBee, more information about how to participate in the project, how to use iNaturalist, a video of ground nesting bees. Lots of good stuff to inspire your bee research journey.

Thanks so much to Jordan for joining us. And to you for listening in. Until next time, keep observing.