The Noble Native Bee (Ep. 1)

Do you wear bee googles? Listen to the latest episode to find out, what they are, and why you should!

In today’s episode we’re discussing the unique lifestyle of solitary bees and their importance in pollination. Unlike honeybees, solitary bees do not have queens or workers, and each female bee is responsible for raising her own offspring. They create nests in holes in the ground or hollow plants and collect food to lay eggs. Our guest, Chris Helzer, emphasizes the importance of habitat for wild bees, including bare ground for ground-nesting bees and stems for stem-nesting bees. Additionally, we highlight the significance of diversity in flowers for pollinators, especially during the spring when resources are scarce. Chris encourages listeners to view the world through the perspective of bees and consider their habitat and food needs.

Many thanks to Chris Helzer, the Nature Conservancy’s Director of Science in Nebraska for introducing us to the native bee, the threats they are under, and how we can support them.

Visit Chris’ blog, The Prairie Ecologist and check out his books, The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States and Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter. You’ll also discover his gorgeous photography, of not only bees and follow him on Instagram: @prairieecologist.

Learn more about the dangers facing native bees in this article.

Did you know?

The Obama’s established the first beehive at the White House. This video tells the backstory of why and how it came to be.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Bees’ Knees, I’m your host Jacy Meyer, thank you for being here! There’s a lot of talk and research around saving the bees. When we hear the worrying news about threats to bees and the knock on effect it can have on crop production and plant biodiversity, honey bees are often in the spotlight. Native bees on the other hand are sometimes left out of the conversation. Native bees pollinate native plants, many of which can’t be pollinated by introduced bees, like the honey bee. In fact, native bees are estimated to pollinate 80 percent of flowering plants around the world.

And bee numbers are big. There are nearly 20,000 known bee species in the world, and 4,000 of them are native to North America. There are about 1650 native bee species in Australia and more than 200 in the United Kingdom.

So today, let’s get to know the native bee a bit more, and joining me to discuss their importance is Chris Helzer. He’s the The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Science in Nebraska in the United States and the author of two books, The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States and Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter.

Chris, thanks so much for being with us. First off, can you share with us a little bit about the lifestyle of a native bee?

Yeah, for sure. I think the thing that is interesting with native bees, well, first of all, there’s a lot of different kinds of lifestyles with native bees, but I think the one that’s most interesting is the solitary bee lifestyle, mostly because it’s different than I think what people learn in school about bees, which.

You know, bees have queens and workers in this complex system that kind of supports the entire group of them. And for the majority of native wild bees, that’s just not the case. They are single moms for the most part, who are trying to raise kids by themselves. And they do that by creating a nest, either in a hole in the ground that they make, or in a, in a hollow plant that they, that they hollow out and.

Put cells into, and then they spend the majority of their time collecting food. So pollen and nectar, mostly pollen, and then putting them in the, putting the food in the cells, laying egg with it, sealing it up, and then repeating that process and stacking these provision cells on top of each other within a nest.

Again, there’s no queen. There’s no defense system. There’s no communication with others. With other individuals, for the most part. Like that varies, of course, between species, but it’s really just one mom out there doing it. And then the males of those solitary bee species really just hang out around flowers hoping to see a female that they can meet with.

And so if you’re out looking at flowers and you see a bee that’s just moving around it, never stopping for more than a second. That’s probably a male and it’s probably just looking for females versus a female who is very laboriously, you know, working their way around or through a flower gathering every little bit of food that she can because she’s the one that’s taking it back to the nest.

So that’s in a nutshell, that’s kind of the solitary lifestyle.

We hear a lot, we about the terms native bee, wild bee, solitary bee. Can we use those interchangeably?

To some extent, yes. So wild bees would be any bee that’s not, you know, basically any bee that’s not a honey bee or in some cases there are things like mason bees sometimes that are used.

You know, there’s a person that is brought bees in and are taking care of them and using them kind of like livestock in a way. To create a product or to facilitate the creation of a product. So those would be domestic bees. Everything else is pretty much a wild bee. Solitary bees would be a subset of those wild bees that have that lifestyle that I talked about because there are wild bees, like a lot of bumblebee species that have a lot of similarities to, to honey bees in terms.

A queen, and you know, division of labor. One big difference, at least with North American honeybees or bumblebees, I mean, is that they don’t normally survive as a group through more than a season. So at the end of a season, all the bumblebees die except the ones that will be queens next year and start their own colonies.

So they have to restart the colony every year where honeybees tend to be able to sort of keep that going through the winter and you know, just maintain that same colony for a long time.

What exactly does a native bee do best compared to for, like we said, a honeybee?

There are a lot of things that honeybees can do really well, including, you know, being very efficient with cleaning out resources, so they can find.

A species of flower that is producing the kind of food quality that they want for the hive, and they can go and get it and they can get a lot of it very quickly because there’s a lot of them and they can communicate where it is and where it’s at and how to get it, all those sorts of things. But they’re also limited by their tongue length, their size.

And just their habits and the need to feed a large quantity of, of, you know, siblings and family members. And so there are a lot of flower species that honeybees either don’t visit or aren’t very good at pollinating. And that’s where I think the wild bees really come in, and, and are so important because the vast majority of flowers in North America, for example, aren’t efficiently pollinated by honey.

And so there are individuals or groups of native wild bees that are better suited to, to fit inside them or to reach the nectar with a longer tongue or to, you know, visit them in a at a certain time of day or carry the pollen away or come out at the right time of year. There’s all these connections that have been built over a long periods of time with these wild bees.

And then the other part of that is that there’s a resilience built up because of the diversity of wild bees available. if a few of those bees are having a rough year, because of a disease or weather or you know, who knows whatever, what other factors, there are other wild bee species that’ll be working on those same flowers.

So the flowers are going to get pollinated one way or the other because there’s a diversity of possibilities, that are coming at them to, to help them pollinate.

You mentioned, native bees, that might run into problems in different, in different seasons. What would you say are some of the biggest threats?

I mean, the overriding problem with bees in North America is habitat loss, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation. There are lots of other things that are problematic, you know, pesticides, disease organisms, but all of those would be much less important if we. Large connected habitats because when you have small fragmented habitats, you have small populations which are then very vulnerable to being, you know, sort of wiped out at a local site because of something that happens with pesticide or, you know, a disease or, I mean, and climate, climate change is another big one, of course, because, that’s affecting flowers and when they bloom and how they bloom and the timing of emergence of flowers and the timing of emergence of which is something we should talk about actually. But again, all of that is, I think, less important than habitat. If we had large connected blocks of habitat with a lot of flowers that were blooming from spring through fall, so that at any one point during that time there were multiple species of flowers available, so bees could choose and pick the ones that are best for their diet needs and the nutritional needs of their babies.

If we had all of that, the diseases and pesticides and everything else would be less important than they. . And then just to talk about the emergence for a second. Sorry. one of the things that’s important, an important difference that I didn’t mention earlier with solitary bees especially, is that they do tend to have a short life cycle above ground or out of their nest.

So as an adult, you might have a solitary bee that’s on that’s out and moving around in the landscape for maybe three, four weeks, maybe five or six weeks. and then the rest of the year, everything happens in the nest, below ground, inside a stem or whatever. And so some bees have multiple generations per year where they’ll lay eggs and then those babies will hatch out and be out as adults later in the year.

But a lot of them only come out one time a year and they time that emergence from their nest with a particular resource. So a particular, a particular group of flowers or an abundance of flowers or something else in the landscape. so that they come out when it’s the right time for the food and they’re protected underground for the rest of the year.

And so then that, you know, ties into climate change of course, because if climate change is changing that schedule, we need the schedule of the bees and the schedule of the flowers to change in the same way. And we’re really too early to know for sure how that’s working. There’s evidence both ways.

There’s evidence that says it looks like it’s going to work well for some of these species and it there’s evidence on other species as well. Maybe there’s some risks here that we’re going to have to really , but that’s, you know, I said, I guess I said Habitat was the overriding threat and I think it is. But climate change may be more, , more of an overriding threat.

It’s just a little bit more of an unknown at this point. Unknown.

Yeah, it’s definitely something to keep our eye on and talk about in future episodes. I want to go back to two things you mentioned, though, specifically the habitat and nesting. I love what you were saying about the abundance of flowers and the variety of flowers so that every bee kind of is able to find the, the nectar that they need.

Is there a way that, so two-part question is, what, how can we as gardeners in our homes, make sure we are providing a good resource for a number of different, and second part, how can we help them with their nesting sites?

Yeah. Well, let me start with the nesting first. The nesting sites, it, it varies by bee species in general, we think that bare ground is really important and if, if you’re a, if you’re a ground nesting bee, access to the soil is important.

What we don’t know as much about, does that mean you have a bunch of plants growing above the ground? But if you look between the plants, you can see bare ground and then they’ll nest there? Or does that mean that you need like a patch of exposed soil with very few plants growing it? And it obviously depends on the species, but we really don’t know all that much about nesting for a lot of these species because it’s really hard to find nests.

And in some ways the nests that were easier, that are easiest for us to find are in the patches of open bare ground. Because we can see the hole and we can see the bees coming in and. so we, we might be, we probably are a little biased toward that as a preferred habitat, but we do know what’s important. And so in a garden situation, for example, if you can leave some areas that are just bare ground, that’s probably going to be beneficial to at least some bee species.

And by the way, wasps also, which are important pollinators, wasps get a bad rap just like bees do, where, we think they’re all the same and, and they’re not. The vast majority of wasps are also solitary. You know, our pollinators. And anyway, that’s a whole other podcast topic as well. But, so bare ground I think is important, both in terms of patches of bare ground, but also just making sure that not every part of a garden is patched and mulched to the point where you just don’t, don’t have soil access, right?

Because access to the soil is important for those bees. Also, nesting habitat for stem nesters is really just, just means leaving some of the stems from previous years cut high enough that they can use them. So in my personal garden we have, some wildflowers that we cut at about a 15 inch height and then we just let them, they’re perennial so they just grow the next year and they grow, you know, three feet tall or whatever.

But we’ve got a pretty solid group of, little bees that nest in those stems every year and it’s really fun to watch ’em. You can see the male. Again, males are crazy, but they, they go from stem to stem to stem, seeing if anybody’s home, right? And then the females are trying to sneak in while the males aren’t there, and you can just sit there and watch that in your garden.

Just because I left those stems cut high enough. Right? So a lot of it really comes down to thinking differently about the manicured garden in a way that you see it through the eyes of the bees and other pollinators that are looking for habitat, right? And that gets us to the second piece, which is also important, which is the flowering.

But that habitat piece, it really is, really is key because especially if you live in town, there’s probably not a lot of other habitat outside of gardens for those bees to nest in. And so it is important to think beyond just the flowers. But on the flower side, I mean the, the, the real key really is diversity.

It’s the more species of flowers you have available, the better because it gives the pollinators a lot of choices. and if you are out in your garden, say once a week, and you can just take note of, okay, how many things are flowering right now, and do they look different from each other? In other words, if, if you go out in June and the first month or first week of June, there’s a lot of things blooming in the second week of June, there’s not much blooming.

That would be a reason to think about, okay, what could I put into my garden that would fill that gap? Right? That’s a real important thing to think. But also if you go out in the second week of June and you have three species that are blooming, but they all look kind of like little daisies, that might be something to think about too.

Right? Maybe I could add some legumes or some flower shapes and types that are different because that’s, you know, a reasonable facsimile for the kinds of resources that those flowers might provide. And, you know, there are bees that are out and active at night, so things like evening primroses or things that bloom in the evenings can be important for those.

I mean, just anything you can, anything you can do to add diversity is going to be helpful. And I think now this is, this is something that people have very different opinions on, which is, should you only use native wildflowers? And my thought on that is it’s your garden. Your garden should make you happy.

That’s why you have a garden. Right? And there’s no reason that, for example, in my garden, we have Zayas in our garden because they’re big and gorgeous, and we like and we intermix them with our native wildflowers and we see butterflies and bees on them all the time. We also have daffodils because we like them and they come up early in the spring and they’re colorful.

And again, like the last couple years, the first bumblebees that I’ve seen each year, which are the queens that are going to start a colony, the first ones I’ve seen each year have been on daffodils. And so there are some reasons to be careful with non-native flowers because the, because some of them were bred to.

Not produce a lot of resources or to hide those resources in a way that bees can’t access them. And there’s some pesticide issues you have to be careful of in terms of, you know, was it grown with a pesticide that lives inside the plant and can be dangerous. But really apart from that, it’s the diversity is more important than the nativity, the native quality of the, of the flowers, in my opinion.

And again, you’ll find other people who are much more purist about that. And that’s also fine. If you want to have a completely native flower garden, you should do it if it makes you happy.

Variety is the spice of life. Yep. Even for bees and the diet, no one wants to eat the same thing every day. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned about stinging and wasps and bees that sting and that is quite a, myth about, bees. Are there any other myths you would like to debunk?

Well, I think we should talk about the stinging because I do think that’s an important one, which is. You know, I’ve been stung by honeybees. I’ve been stung by bumblebees. In both cases I know why I was stung, right? With, with bumblebees, I either was disturbing their colony and they were defending the colony, which fair enough.

Or, I trapped one, one time against myself and it was trying to get away again. Fair enough. I would sting too, if I had that opportunity.

That’s exactly what happened to me the last time I was stung.

Yeah. and, and I mean, it hurts. It’s, there’s no question about it. And, and honeybees, which I think hurt much less honeybees.

I was trying to photograph some near their, their, their colony and I was close, I was probably too close. And then again, it was really just like it got, I got one that was on my hand and I put my fingers together and squeezed it a little bit accidentally, and it stung me. And again, okay. I’m sorry.

Right. And we both, you know, apologized and went on our way, I guess, but, so, but one other, one other myth with the stinging, well, two things. One really is that most solitary bees can’t, and, and this is true for wasps also, they can’t really afford to sting because. They, they can’t, well, it’s not that they, and this is the second myth is, is that they’re going to pull their stinger out.

Right? That’s not true with most bees. So with honey bees, that can happen with most bees. They don’t have a barbed stinger, so they can sting you and then fly away. But they mostly aren’t going to take that chance because if they get into a fight and lose, they’re the only one taking care of the family, right?

They just can’t take that risk. So they would much rather get away than sting you. So in your garden, if you see a bee that’s out collecting resources on a flower, the last thing they want to do is involve themselves with you. Right? Which is why they’ll usually fly away if they’re not, you know, too distracted by what they’re eating.

But even if you see them, and even if you come after them, their first choice will always be to run or fly. Because they just, they can’t take that chance. Right.

Kind of going back to, threats and how, what we can do to support native bees throughout the year. Is there a particular season that is more dangerous, maybe dangerous isn’t the best word, but that is more difficult for native bees? Yeah. And what can we do in that season that might make it a little bit easier for them?

Yeah, so the spring, that early part of the season can be the trickiest for a lot of bee species and, and it’s why? A lot of bee species don’t come out of their nests until later because there just aren’t a lot of resources in the spring.

Wildflowers tend to be smaller, and produce fewer flowers and less resources, you know, less resources overall. But also there’s just, it’s, they tend to be spread out and a lot of the pollen and nectar that early bee species use comes from shrubs and trees. And so it’s not something I’m, I’m a prairie person.

I think about grasslands and, and we’re trying to fight off trees and shrubs that are trying to come into our grasslands a lot of times, but we don’t try to eliminate them because we know, and for, for many reasons. But one of the reasons is that those, those shrubs, especially flower and shrubs, have some of the most abundant resources available during the spring.

And so species like bumblebees, which are trying to get an early start, you know, that new queen bumblebee is going to need, you know, several weeks to collect enough food to keep herself alive to, you know, provision the eggs that she’s laying. And then once those eggs hatch, then she’s got a bunch of workers that take care of her and she can stay inside.

But for that first several, you know, month or so, like she has to survive. And if she dies, the, the entire potential colony goes. And so making sure that there are resources available for those early pieces of bees. And again, bumblebees are one example. There’s lots of solitary bees that are around too. So anything you can do in your garden to produce flowers that bloom right at that leading edge of the spring and then fill that first month with a lot of abundance and diversity can really be helpful.

Because they’ll probably be pretty desperate in terms of what else is available around.

I know that you have a favorite bee species. The blues, the, excuse me, the blue sage bee. Why is this bee so special?

Oh man, there’s so many reasons. It’s, there’s, there’s a personal history that I have with it, but I’ll tell you about the bee first. So the bee, the blue sage bee is one of the only ones, maybe the only one that, it’s the only one I know of that we think has an affinity for a species of plant. So there are a lot of bees that have a fairly selective diet where they might, they might just like sunflowers, right? But they’ll feed from many different kinds of sunflowers. But the blue sage bee, as far as we know, only feeds from blue sage or pitcher sage.

It’s a salvia. Salvia aurea is the name of the species of flower. And so if you don’t have the flower, you won’t have the bee. Now the flower doesn’t need the bee as much as the other way around because the flower has lots of things that pollinate pitcher sage or blue sage is very popular with lots of pollinators, but blue the blue sage bee needs that plant and it has to then emerge at the right time from, it’s from, its, you know, larval form, it pupate and it comes out in an adult at the right time for blue sage to be open in blooming.

So it’s one of those that we think is, you know, going to be at risk from climate change, but also land management. You know, if, if, if that bee lives in a place where all the blue sage is in a road ditch that gets mowed, or in a pasture that gets grazed or in a hay meadow that gets hayed, if that haying or grazing happens at the wrong time, that blue sage bee comes out and there’s nothing there, and then what’s it going to do?

Right? So, I like it because it’s vulnerable, but I also like it because it’s gorgeous. It’s, I like eye color, in many colors, but the particular blue in the blue eyes of the blue sage bee is just amazing and it matches the blue of the color of the flower that it feeds on, which is just too great to ignore.

And so there’s, I like it for that reason also, it’s just a cute little fuzzy bee that’s kind of a silvery, with these bright blue eyes. Kind of a modeled blue eyes, I mean, yeah. Anyway, look it up. It’s great. Okay. But I also have a personal history with it, which starts from the first time I ever saw one.

I took a photo of it, but I didn’t know what it was. And I was really early on in learning about bees and it looked enough like a honeybee that I just assumed it was a honey bee but it was a little smaller. But it’s like, you know, well, bees come in multiple sizes.

Sometimes they’re bigger or smaller in the same species and I gave a presentation on prairies to a group of biologists in Missouri, and I brought up this picture of the honeybee and I was talking about bees and why they were important. And there was somebody in the front row who was grimacing the whole time I was talking about this bee. And so after I finished talking, he raised his hand and he said, actually, I want to tell you about this bee that you said it was a honeybee, because it’s not.

It’s way better. And here, let me tell you about it. And so he was the one that introduced me to that. And then we started talking about it and thinking, and where I had photographed that bee had been a cornfield, say six years earlier, and it was in the middle of this county in Nebraska that’s mostly cornfields and, and pitcher sage or blue sage just isn’t very common.

Like, I don’t know. The nearest plant to that site was probably 10 to 15 miles away at at best, and yet, not too many years after that cornfield was turned back into prairie habitat with that plant being included, that bee had shown up at that site. Wow. And neither of us could really explain how that had happened.

Like we see it happen all the time, but we still don’t really know how it happens. We assume that they can smell it or sense it in some way, but from 15 miles away? Right. Or or are some of those bees just striking out randomly in different directions, hoping to come across something and dying if they don’t find it, which is also an amazing story.

Right? Right. Exactly. . So either way it happens, makes me love the bee even more. And I don’t, I think I’ve seen it three times in my lifetime. Wow. So I saw it the first time and I’ve seen it twice since. So I don’t see it very often. I’ve photographed it, on a flower. The second time I saw it, and the third time I saw it, I actually caught it because we were working with some people on bees and I just happened to see it and I caught it to show people and we chilled it enough that they could take a close look at it.

And I took a picture. Then it warmed up and flew away. But I, I, you know, clearly I want to see it again, so I keep looking every time I’ve pass by blue sage. I pause just for a second to see if there’s a blue sage bee on it.

I think we’re all going to look for the blue sage bee now every time we pass by the plant.

Oh, that’s a wonderful story. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Last question, anything else you would like to share about native bees? How amazing they are, their importance, what we can do to?

Yeah, I think I would encourage everybody to look at the world through bee goggles sometimes. And what I mean by that is, you know, like earlier I talked about if you’re in your garden, you know, once a week, just take, take accounting of, of what’s available.

And that’s, that’s kind of what it means to look through the world in, with bee goggles, I guess, or just look through the eyes of a bee, you know, evaluate the world around you from that perspective. And so that can include looking for nesting habitat. It can mean looking for flowering habitat. But I think the other thing that we really haven’t talked about yet, but that’s important is that these bees are tied to a nest, right?

So that solitary bee mother has a nest that she can’t get too far away from. So there’s a radius around that. Nest that is really her universe that she can feed in. And within that circle, she needs to find all the resources that she needs to stay alive. She can’t go two miles, a bigger bee might be able to go that far.

A bumblebee could probably go two miles, but they don’t want to. But we’re really talking about the size of, you know, a square block or a couple of blocks in a city as being the universe for some of these really small bees. And I think if you think about the world in that way, and then look at the resources available at that scale, you can just sort of put a bunch of circles across the ground, across the earth and think if I was a bee nesting in that circle, how would, how would things look for me, right?

Would I be able to survive? And it just changes the whole way that you look at their, your surroundings. If you think about it from the perspective of a bee, and I think it’s really helpful. And it doesn’t mean that you have to make every circle on the earth be habitat, but the circles that you have some influence on.

It’s a way to think about how could I improve the situation for a bee that might be living in this little circle near me, right? So that’s, that’s what I would say. I think that’s a really helpful way to just explore the world around you and, and be helpful to bees at the same time.

Bee goggles! I loved everything Chris shared with us, but especially appreciated the reminder that thinking like a bee is the best way to support them.

Thanks so much to Chris Helzer for joining us today. Read the show notes to learn more about Chris, the work he does, the books he wrote and see some of his beautiful prairie photography. You’ll find it all at our website, thebeeknees.website. While you are there, why not sign-up for our newsletter?

If you enjoyed today’s show it would mean a lot if you could leave a review but more importantly tell a friend. It really helps get the word out not only about the show, but even more importantly about bees.

Thanks again for listening, I appreciate your time. I’ll see you back here in 2 weeks when we’re going to explore one of the topics Chris mentioned and that’s nesting sites and the best way we can build for bees. Until then, keep buzzing.