06/26/2024
If you're still struggling a bit with understanding the different native bee families and HOW they differ, Bug Guide did an excellent job of pinning it down for you, and at providing other resources (hyperlinked) for your further discovery. Please bee sure to click on each of their photos for a MUCH more impressive view and for a brief description of the behaviors and plants.
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"Native Bees of North America"
https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348
"Native bees are an unappreciated treasure, with 4,000 species from tiny Perdita to large carpenter bees, they can be found anywhere in North America where flowers bloom. Most people don’t realize that there were no honey bees in America until the white settlers brought hives from Europe. These resourceful insects promptly managed to escape domestication, forming swarms and setting up housekeeping in hollow trees, other cavities or even exposed to the elements just as they had been doing in their native lands. Native pollinators, in particular bees, had been doing all the pollination in this continent before the arrival of that import from the Old World. They continue to do a great deal of it, especially when it comes to native plants.
The honey bee, remarkable as it is, doesn’t know how to pollinate a tomato or an eggplant flower, while some native bees are masters at this. The same thing happens with a number of native plants, such as pumpkins and squash, blueberries and cranberries, which are more efficiently pollinated by native bees than by honey bees. Let us take a closer look at this forgotten treasure of native bees.
Native bees come in a wide range of sizes; they are also varied in their shapes, life styles, places they frequent, nests they build, flowers they visit and season of activity. They remain unnoticed by most of us and yet they provide valuable services to all kinds of flowering plants, from wild flowers to some important crops. For instance, the Southeastern blueberry bee is a hard working little creature, capable of visiting as many as 50,000 blueberry flowers in her short life and pollinating enough of them to produce more than 6,000 ripe blueberries worth about $20 at the market. Not every bee that you see flitting about may be worth $20 but all of them combined keep the world of flowering plants going; flowering plants are a key component of most land ecosystems.
Bees are descended from wasps. Most wasps are carnivores; they either prey upon or parasitize other little creatures, mostly other insects, and use this rich protein source to feed their babies. Many millions of years ago, when the first flowering plants begun to bloom, some wasps made a switch from hunting prey to gathering pollen for their brood. Perhaps they were hunting for insects that visited flowers and ate some of the pollen along with their prey. It didn’t take much to find the advantages of consuming pollen over hunting. Pollen is also rich in proteins and doesn’t fight back so it is easy to imagine why they were happy to become vegetarians. Gathering pollen and nectar requires certain adaptations different from those of hunters; so they started to change to meet these requirements and consequently became bees.
Most bees have very furry bodies and the hairs are feathery, better for trapping loose pollen. If you observe bees or bumble bees visiting flowers you will notice that some are totally covered by pollen grains.
However, this would not be a very convenient way for transporting their cargo back to the nest, so most have pollen baskets of one sort or another, either on their hind legs or under their bellies. They frequently brush themselves, picking all those loose pollen grains and transferring them to their pollen baskets. They have a fairly long tongue to sip the nectar usually buried in the heart of the flower, and a large crop or a second stomach for carrying it. A few less visible adaptations took place also when bees were evolving from wasps, including a knack for finding flowers through smell, colors and patterns and a good memory to keep going back to the same flowers that yield a good recompense.
The mother bee uses some of the nectar to mix it with the pollen. She also uses it for her own nutrition; nectar is a high octane fuel and with all the flying she does she needs a lot of fuel. In this respect bees resemble many of their relatives, the wasps.
All bee families have species that take care of their young by building nests and providing food for them. But several families, such as Apidae, Halictidae and Megachilidae have some black sheep, some selfish species that take advantage of their relatives. They have become “cuckoos”, just like there are cuckoos among birds. As with cuckoo birds they lay their eggs in the nests of others. Their babies feed on the stored food and also on the larvae of the unfortunate hosts. Cuckoo bees don’t need to gather pollen and have lost their pollen baskets and much of their hair, in fact, at first sight some of them are often mistaken for wasps.
Aside from cuckoo bees, all bees build nests, stocking them with a nutritious mixture of pollen, nectar and saliva before laying their eggs, and usually sealing them so the babies remain safe. They generally mix the dry pollen with some nectar kneading it into a bee loaf, used to feed their children. They add their own saliva to this mixture. The saliva seems to be an important ingredient that confers some protection against bacteria and fungus infections.
Some build their nests underground, others use hollow stems or holes in trees, perhaps left by beetles, others use their powerful jaws to make holes in wood. Be as it may they start the job of nest building by carefully choosing the best real estate; if conditions aren’t right they continue their search. It wouldn’t do to have their homes flooded or lacking enough sunshine, or being too large or too small for their needs."
(graphic from the Jha Bee Lab at UT)
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