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One of the major benefits of paying attention to the natural world is that no matter how long you’ve been doing it, there’s always more to learn. Within the last five years I’ve gone from knowing honey bees, bumblebees, and mason bees to devoting many hours to the breathtakingly nerdy pursuit of studying the wealth of Washington’s native bees.

The best thing about this real life Pokemon pursuit, (I’ll take running around like an idiot staring at zipping dots any day to chasing things that only exist on my phone), is that I don’t actually have to go that far to get stumped. I can just hang out on a lawn and be a lawn-chair melittologist.

With projects like Pollinator Pathways and Capitol Hill Connections it shouldn’t be surprising that you can find interesting insects on the Hill, let alone a bunch of cool bees. The thing about many invertebrate species is that while some require very specific conditions and host plants that are lacking in urban spaces, they also don’t need the same physical space that, say, a wolf does. Some scrubby ground, some flowers with sufficiently tasty nectar, and a dearth of pesticides and a lot of species make it work or even flourish on the Hill even if we don’t get the same diversity a native prairie would have.

I’ve written about native bees in the past, so you’ll excuse me while I repeat some vitals. There are at least 600 species of native bees in Washington state (it’s quite possible that as enthusiasts grow, that number might climb apace), including our well known bumble bees, but not the common honey bee, Apis mellifera which is introduced. Out of all of them, over 90% build solitary nests where a single female bee deposits one or several eggs that hatch without the dotage of their mother. Don’t confuse solitary nesting with being completely antisocial (there are many exceptions and a wide variety of behaviors), but overall, it’s safe to say that most bees do not live in big eusocial groups with queens, sister workers, and drone males nor do they make honey. (Honey bees are the exception not the rule.) A female spends her life preparing for a generation she typically never meets or has anything to do with and males mostly just wait around eating till its time to mate. Most die over the winter and those eggs from last year hatch and continue ever forwards.

Equally of note is that a vast majority, around 70%, of these solitary bees nest in the ground. When we look at our lawns, only the most chemically drenched of them are as homogenous as we think and the little spaces between grasses and uninvited plants can host bees! Before you start getting freaked out over the concept of bees in the lawn, the vast majority of them do not or even cannot sting you, nor are they often of a size that you’d find threatening (see images); in fact I guarantee you’ve spent time with them without ever knowing it.

There’s nothing special about boring grass though — I am not arguing for more lawns. Just suggesting that they are, in a way, a bit of habitat we take for granted. Less tidy lawns with flowering “weeds” mixed in would be better. A few nice flowering plants in a garden bed nearby, like some asters and ocean spray would be even better. And best would be the lawn torn up and replanted with natives and bare patches of soil for our little bee friends to nest. Still, we have lawns.

There are whole dramas being played out there too. The sunny afternoons this past week had me enraptured, which to neighbors must have looked like me staring intently at the ground and prancing about like an idiot. But when I kneel down there, dozens of small bees are zipping about, dutifully bringing back pollen and nectar to their nests or waiting to meet a passing mate. Yet others are parasite bee species, there to bully mothers into giving up their hard earned pollen, or to sneak into those mothers’ nests to deposit their own eggs in the nest cavity. Other species that aren’t even bees, like bombardier flies and several solitary wasps do exactly the same thing. And of course there are predators, which are part of the reason many bees are exasperatingly hard to photograph or get close to: the many wasps, flies, and spiders that want to eat them make for many a fast, wary bee that dashes away at the slightest movement.

The plants I’ve permitted to grow on the weedy edges of my lawn are particularly productive and exciting despite being “weeds,” and there are multiple families of bees represented in this space. There are members of the Andrenidae family, the largest bee family, displaying a diversity of sizes and shapes, including the tiny bees in the genus Perdita, which are just about the size of a pinhead. Halcitidae bees, which are abundant in numbers as well as diverse, my favorite being brilliant green metallic sweat bees in the genus Agapostemon. Many members of the Colletidae bee family secrete a cellophane like substance to line the cells of their subterranean nests, giving them the nickname cellophane bees. And mixed in, sometimes just there for the flowers are many more characters, like small carpenter bees of the genus Ceratina, cousins to bumble bees and honey bees, but you’d never guess it by their stature, a shiny smooth carapace, and their preference for nesting in the pithy centers of woody shrubs and last year’s flower stalks.

Just figuring out you are looking at bees, when they are often the size of a sunflower seed, the color of a raisin, and move faster than you can think, can be challenging. Little clues, like flight patterns and anatomy, lead you to discern bees from flies and wasps (I appreciate this article to help us tell them apart). To get beyond bee or not bee I perform an elaborate dance of an insect net, little jars, a macro lens, infinite patience, and specific ethical practices followed up by a year of staring at the vein patterns in photos of their wings. And usually my stab at identifying them to genus is wrong. When compared to birds, which experts can identify beyond species into regional varieties by a single call note, bees are terribly humbling. And so f#*cking exciting.

A growing interest in native bees and the general societal shift to supporting pollinators has helped spawn a new organization in the past year: the Washington Native Bee Society. They hold free monthly meetings, are building resources for the public to use, and have a wonderful blog to peruse. I bring this up because once you start realizing there are amazing, gentle, cute little creatures living their lives just outside your door, ones that you’ve never noticed and which are devilishly hard to see, you’ll probably want to start learning more. I also can’t recommend “The Bees in Your Backyard” by Jospeh S. Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carril enough. If you catch the “bug” as it were, you will also undoubtedly find yourself perusing iNaturalist or Bugguide.net.

So, yeah, I think bees are cool. And you should too, not just because they are interesting and deserve our respect as other beings we share the Hill with, but because they perform vital ecosystem services, visiting flowers not just for themselves but for their young, making them some of the best pollinators out there, (so stop using gross shit on your lawn because we all know pollinators are in decline). Next time you walk across a sunny patch of grass, pause a second and look around: you might find yourself bent over like an ostrich, staring pointedly at the ground mumbling “now is that a bee or is it a fly?”

 

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Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.