Learning the Bees
90% of the 20,000 or so species of bees in the world are solitary.
Most of them are not interested in stinging you.
Many of them live underground. Many others live in small holes in fallen trees or plant stems.
We tend to think bees live in social (or eusocial) hives, and that they swarm, because those are the ones we make the most intentional use of.
Bees that are solitary are important pollinators everywhere, but because we don’t make money (or get honey) from them directly, we tend not to notice them.
Some native bees in the U.S. (we have about 4000 native species) are so small that if they landed on the eye of a large bumblebee they wouldn’t cover the whole eye.
Which means they might fly past me or even land on my skin without my noticing it.
Want to learn more about bees? Here are a few quick tips:
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Go outside and watch different sizes of flowers. Be still for a while so you don’t scare them away. Also go outside early on a cool morning in late summer to see the little ones sleeping on flowers.
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Buy a copy of The Bees In Your Backyard. Trust me. Worth it.
