Native bees of North America

The native bees of North America are roughly 3,600–4,000 species that pollinated the continent's flora for tens of millions of years before the first honey bee hive came by ship in 1622. They are not one animal but a radiation — bumblebees and mason bees, leafcutters and sweat bees, digger bees, carpenter bees, squash bees, plasterer "polyester" bees — nearly all of them living on a life plan so different from ** that the word "bee" almost means two things in one language.^[1]

Mostly solitary

The popular picture of bee life — a queen, thousands of workers, a comb, stored honey — describes one imported species. About ninety percent of native species are solitary: a female mates, builds and provisions her own nest cells (in soil, hollow stems, wood tunnels, or resin partitions), and dies before her offspring emerge. There is no colony to defend, no worker caste, and no stored surplus — which is also why most native bees sting only under direct provocation, and many cannot sting effectively at all.^[2]

Efficiency the honey bee can't match

Native bees are frequently better pollinators per visit, for two different reasons:

• Fidelity. Solitary species often specialize — the squash bee ** co-evolved with cucurbits and works squash blossoms before the honey bee is even foraging. Specialist bees carry the right pollen to the right flower.
• Buzz pollination. Bumblebees and others sonicate flowers — gripping the anthers and vibrating their flight muscles to shake pollen out of poricidal anthers. Tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, blueberries, and cranberries are largely unpollinable by honey bees, which cannot buzz.^[3]

In orchard trials, small numbers of managed mason bees (**, the blue orchard bee) routinely outperform far larger deployments of honey bees — the oft-quoted rule of thumb that one mason bee does the work of a hundred honey bees reflects foraging efficiency and messier pollen delivery.^[4]

The declines nobody swarms to

While managed honey bee colonies are replaced by their owners each spring, native bees have no one to restock them — and they are the species actually in trouble. The rusty patched bumblebee (), once common across the Midwest and Northeast, became the first bee in the continental United States listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2017 after an ~87% range collapse. Franklin's bumblebee () has not been seen since 2006 and may be extinct. Xerces Society assessments put roughly a quarter of North American bumblebees at some risk — against pressures of habitat loss, pesticides, climate, and the diseases spilling out of managed bees.^[5]

See also

• Honey bees in North America — the imported species in context
• Honey bee competition with native pollinators — the resource conflict
• Pathogen spillover in bees — the disease dimension
• Save the bees — which bees actually need saving, and what helps
• Honey bee infestation — what a colony in your wall really means