Native bee illustration
Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / Photos by Joos Mind via Getty Images and USGS Bee Lab under public domain
Native bees in the United States are dying due to pesticides, disease and habitat loss. These insects play a critical role in nature and on farms, yet we know very little about native bees in part because they’re a challenge to study.
That’s where a legion of bee enthusiasts and amateur experts, called “beeple,” come in. Armed with nets and jars, they fan out across the country to find, document and study native bees, both common and rare. Host Ari Daniel interviewsSmithsonianwriter Susan Freinkel and self-proclaimed bee enthusiast Michael Veit about the future of bees through the lens of the beeple who care deeply about them.
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Ari Daniel: OK. It’s cold today.
Michael Veit: Yeah, well, it was probably 13 degrees, I think, on my thermometer when we woke up this morning.
Daniel: OK. I’m with Michael Veit outside his home in Pepperell, Massachusetts, about an hour’s drive northwest of Boston.
Veit: So, in my backyard here, I have a meadow that I established probably 25 years ago with a mix of native wildflower seeds.
Daniel: Michael likes the plants well enough, but his primary passion is bees.
Veit: I do a lot of bee observing in my backyard. I really like to spend a lot of time watching bees and watching them do what they do.
Daniel: Naturally, in the middle of winter, the bees aren’t doing very much. Where are they right now?
Veit: So most of our bees are ground-nesting bees, so they’re in the ground. Most of them overwinter in what we call a pre-pupal stage, so bees, like beetles and butterflies and many other groups of insects, they have four life stages. They have the egg, the larva, the pupa and the adult.
Daniel: As you can probably tell, Michael knows a thing or two about bees. He belongs to an informal group of amateur bee enthusiasts known as the “beeple.”
Veit: I don’t use that term very often, but I’m interested in bees, I guess. I’m a bee biologist, so I guess I’m one of the beeple. So I plant a lot of things that are attractive to bees, but especially I like to plant species that are the hosts of specialist bees.
Daniel: That is, bees that collect pollen from a narrow range of plants—goldenrods, say, or dogwoods or ground cherries. So this whole landscape, of course, will be transformed in a few months. It’ll get warmer, the snow will melt, the leaves will start to come out, and so will the bees.
Veit: Usually, the first bees will start to come out in late March or April. Usually, the first plant that flowers real early are willows, and I have—this is a willow right here, and so I’ll keep my eyes on the willows. As soon as those pussy willows open up, I’m out there looking to see if I can see my first bees of the season.
Daniel: And what does that feel like?
Veit: Oh, when I see the first bees? Oh, it’s great. It corresponds to a warm spring day, too—that’s always encouraging after a long winter. But yeah, it means I can get out there and start looking and start discovering and exploring.
Daniel: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the sweet and sticky show abuzz with our pollinating friends often overlooked. Well, ignore them no more! I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, we crouch down in the bogs and the bushes to see what the diverse cast of wild bees all around us have to say about our world and their future.
Daniel: So do you have some bees that you’ve collected you could show me?
Veit: Yes, I definitely do. Follow me.
Daniel: Michael leads me into his study, where he offers me a homemade muffin and gives me a tour.
Veit: This is where I do all my bee work, so this is part of my collection over here. So these are bees that I’ve collected that are arranged taxonomically. You know, I probably have 500 species that I’ve collected.
Daniel: I’m surrounded by shelves and shelves of trays containing thousands of pinned bees, and there on the desk is a microscope that Michael’s already set up for me.
Veit: You can’t really appreciate many insects until you look at them under high magnification, and then you realize how beautiful, how detailed, how amazing they are. So I pulled a couple of trays of bees out here just to show you a diversity and some interesting bees and some interesting aspects of bees. So I was thinking that if you would like to, you may set up my microscope and we can look at some bees.
Daniel: Yeah, I’d love that.
Veit: We’ll start off with these. I’m going to move this over here.
Daniel: After a brief coaching session on how to use the microscope …
Veit: So, they’re really delicate.
Daniel: Wow.
Veit: If you touch them to anything, they’re going to break apart. It’s not a huge deal if you do, but if you could just be careful, I would appreciate that.
Daniel: Of course, of course. I don’t want to hurt your bees. I am suddenly face to tiny face …
Veit: And wait until you get a look at this under the microscope.
Daniel: ... with a whole host of bees I’d never even dreamed of before. Oh, my God, it is a bright yellow, completely, like a little golden figurine. I’ll zoom in on it. Look at that. Wow. Sweat bees of the most amazing colors. She’s blue, but it’s like very dark, metallic blue.
Veit: Exactly. Metallic, like gun barrel blue or something like that.
Daniel: Bees that look like they’re covered in armor.
Veit: This is one of the blood bees. It is a bee that specializes on parasitizing bees in the sweat bee family.
Daniel: The abdomen looks like it’s made out of amber.
Veit: It’s beautiful red, that’s why they’re called blood bees.
Daniel: Bees, bees and more bees. I’ve had my eye on this one. This looks like a jewel. It’s green, bright green.
Veit: Wait till you get it under the microscope. It belongs to the genus Agapostemon.
Daniel: Oh, my God. That’s amazing. It’s so bright green, metallic. A parade in miniature of one bee after another under the microscope with Michael beaming beside me.
Veit: This is another kleptoparasite in the genus Triepeolus. It’s spectacular. Look at those gorgeous bands on its body. These are some of my favorites to look at. Eye candy.
Daniel: But there’s one bee here that carries a particular importance for Michael—his crowning achievement, you might say.
Veit: OK, onto the next family. So now I have a male and a female of mining bees that belong to the family Andrena. OK, it’s a really speciose group. We’ve got at least 70 species here in Massachusetts. They’re kind of drab in color.
Daniel: But this one’s totally dusted in pollen.
Veit: It’s totally dusted in pollen. And the reason I chose this out of all the other ones is because this is a pretty special species of bee. This is Andrena rehni. It is the chestnut bee, so it is covered in chestnut pollen. So it’s a bee that I’ve been working with for a few years now, and that actually first got me involved with the Smithsonian.
Daniel: Yeah, I see. OK, so this bee—I can thank this bee for getting to know you.
Veit: Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s a bit of a long story, but it’s a bee that was rediscovered after …
Daniel: Michael studied entomology in graduate school, but it didn’t become a big part of his life until he moved here to Massachusetts.
Veit: I serendipitously fell in love with dragonflies and damselflies.
Daniel: By day, he was a high school biology teacher, but in his spare time, he spent eight or so years traveling around New England in the hopes of spotting these insects.
Veit: Which was just a wonderful period of my life, just wonderful people. You can imagine going to all kinds of really cool wetlands. We’d spend time up in huge peatlands up in Maine and rivers in New Hampshire and bogs and things like that. So I spent quite a bit of time studying dragonflies and damselflies, but after doing that for about ten years, I decided I wanted to do something a little bit more challenging.
Daniel: One day, Michael found himself at a social gathering for beetle enthusiasts, as one does, when he had a chance encounter with a guy working on a bee identification website. This person told him …
Veit: “We need to have more people studying bees.” And my eyes perked up, and I thought, “Bees, now that would be an interesting group to work with.”
Daniel: To get started on his bee journey, Michael decided he had to knowledge up.
Veit: And really the only resource available at that time was this great two-volume set of books written by this guy from North Carolina State University. His name was Theodore Mitchell. Let me grab those books for you.
Daniel: He grabs Bees of the Eastern United States, Volumes 1 and 2 off his bookshelf. They were written in the 1960s.
Veit: The next summer, I decided I was going to try and collect some bees and see if I can identify them.
Daniel: With time, he got better at identifying bees, and along the way, he connected with more and more beeple.
Veit: I met the most amazing, knowledgeable people about bees. And one of the persons emailed me, he said, “You’ve got some really interesting stuff. You’ve got some bees in there that have never been found in Massachusetts before. Keep on sending me your bees.”
Susan Freinkel: A lot of it is citizen science efforts, and a lot of it at this point is focused on trying to figure out who’s out there.
Daniel: This is Susan Freinkel. She wrote about Michael and the beeple for Smithsonian magazine. I rang her up at her home.
Freinkel: There’s something like 3,600 species of native bees, and we really don’t know very much about most of them. Really basic biological facts, like: What’s their range? What plants do they like? What’s their life cycle? So beeple are helping to fill in the blanks about those species, fill in this big scientific gap. And that’s important because we know in a broad sense that pollinators like native bees are in decline, but we don’t know the specifics. And without knowing the specifics, we can’t know what sort of measures are needed to help preserve them and help sustain them.
Daniel: What makes bees so hard to study?
Freinkel: They’re really little. They’re on the move. Most native bees are only out for a few weeks a year. Otherwise, they’re dormant underground in nests, or they’re larvae. And when they’re out and about, they move fast. A lot of them are really hard to see, and their features that distinguish them can be really subtle, so a lot of the identification and understanding has to be done with microscopes and these taxonomic texts. You’ve got to be pretty expert to study native bees.
Daniel: Why should people feel connected to bees?
Freinkel: Well, they literally make our world. Native bees are responsible for pollinating about 80 percent of the flowering plants, 75 percent of the fruits, nuts and vegetables that we have in this country. If you didn’t have native bees doing that really vital job, we wouldn’t starve, but we would have a much less interesting diet. They are the cogs that turn the ecosystem and make it keep going. But there’s also just something amazingly cool about them.
Daniel: Before I met Michael, I had a certain idea of what a bee looked like. Either something like a big, round bumblebee or a fuzzy little black-and-yellow-striped number that churns out honey.
Freinkel: We all know honeybees, but honeybees were actually brought here by the European colonists. They’re not native to North America. The bees that I wrote about in this story and the bees that the beeple are focused on are native bees, and they are very different from honeybees. They’re mostly solitary, moms nesting by themselves, more diverse palette of sizes and colors and so forth than honeybees. They don’t sting. They don’t live in colonies. They don’t, for the most part, make honey.
Daniel: Susan said the way native bees live here in North America has a lot to do with our environment, the specific plants and flowers endemic to this continent, which helps explain all the shapes and colors in that procession of bees I saw under Michael’s microscope.
Freinkel: Native bees co-evolved with the flowering plants in North America and the structure of the bees evolved in synchrony with those plants, so you have bees who have long tongues to slurp nectar out of flowers that have deep cups or bees that have short tongues because they nest on broad, flat flowers. They have special hairs to collect pollen. It’s this incredible co-evolution that I think really speaks to and is the epitome of the interconnectedness of our natural world that we forget about. And you pull one thread and a lot more unravels. And so that’s why I think we should care and feel connected.
Daniel: Yeah, that struck me when I was talking to Michael about this sometimes one-to-one connection or dependence of a bee species with a plant, that there are these little networks that the bees help link up in order to pollinate or encourage the growth and propagation of any number of plant species.
Freinkel: Absolutely. The big threats to native bees are habitat loss, encroachment on their habitat by development; by invasive plants; climate change, which is shrinking the range for some of them; pathogens and pesticides, which they are vulnerable to. A significant portion, I think it’s between 25 and 35 percent of native bees, are specialist bees. They just go to a single plant or family of plants. So if you build a condo on a place where specialist bees have their plants, you’ve just wiped out their habitat.
No bee has been declared extinct in the U.S. They’ve been considered extirpated, which means that they just haven’t been seen in a really long time. But studies do indicate that some species are in danger. It looks like about a quarter of bumblebee species in North America, and there are 49 of those, are in danger. A quarter of a group called mason bees, and they’re called that because they plaster their nests, and nearly half of leafcutter bees are at risk. And right now, there are nine native bees listed on the federal endangered species list. Seven of those are bees from Hawaii, and two of them are bumblebees.
Daniel: Yeah. And, of course, there are a number of plants that really rely on these specialist bees as well.
Freinkel: Let’s take something like blueberries. Blueberries are pollinated by native bees, and actually native bees do a great job, better than managed bees pollinating blueberries. So say the native bees that pollinate blueberries all disappeared. Would we have blueberries?
Daniel: Wow.
Freinkel: I don’t know. A lot of the fruit and vegetables that we really like, there’d be nothing there doing that service of pollinating them so that they can fruit and give us the stuff that we want.
Daniel: It strikes me that the importance of knowing where these bees are, if we’ve overlooked them so much in the past, we don’t even know where their habitat is. And so figuring out who they are, where they live, what they need and what their habitat is, is probably really important for being able to conserve these species.
Freinkel: Absolutely. If we don’t know who’s out there and we don’t know where they are, we can’t even begin to start trying to preserve them.
Daniel: Susan says that restoring certain native bee populations may actually be fairly straightforward.
Freinkel: One of the things that is amazing to me that people told me over and over in this story are anecdotes about how they would plant some native plant and suddenly the bees would show up. They have an amazing capacity to find their plants.
Daniel: But not all specialist bees rely on plants as common or healthy as a blueberry. Susan found her way to the beeple through the story of an endangered plant here in the U.S.—the American chestnut tree.
Freinkel: American chestnut was once one of the dominant trees in East Coast forests. And in the early 20th century, a fungal pathogen arrived imported on trees from China that proved to be incredibly virulent and incredibly deadly to American chestnuts. And it just swept through the chestnut population, the forests on the East Coast.
Daniel: Yeah, as I understand, it completely transformed the appearance and the constitution of forests.
Freinkel: Yes. I mean like four billion trees died in the space of about 50 years. It basically wiped out chestnuts from American forests. And from the time the blight arrived, scientists have been trying to figure out how to save the American chestnut as a species.
Daniel: Turns out that Sam Droege, one of the beeple organizers in Maryland, happened to have a relative of the American chestnut tree near his research lab.
Freinkel: It’s a chinquapin bush. So in 2018, he saw some bees buzzing around on it and he collected them. They were like these little brown bees, nothing particularly exciting to look at. But when he later sat down and looked at them under the microscope, he realized that they were a species called Andrena rehni, and that was a bee that hadn’t been seen in 80 to 100 years. So he put out word on his Listserv of beeple, saying, “Hey, folks, go look around at chestnuts, see if you can find this bee.” And several people took him up on that.
Veit: Sam put a call out over the bee Listserv.
Daniel: This is Michael Veit again.
Veit: It’s a bee that was rediscovered after not having been captured or documented for over a hundred years.
Freinkel: Michael Veit and some other beeple he knows heard about places in western Massachusetts where tornadoes had gone through and cleared the canopy.
Veit: Sites where American chestnuts have resprouted and been able to reach a level of maturity where they are flowering.
Freinkel: Because even though mature chestnut trees were killed off, the blight doesn’t kill the roots of the trees. And so you can still have these sprouts that are out there in the forest that keep coming up when they get the opportunity. Once they reach maturity, once they get old enough to start blossoming, the blight comes back and kills them back down again. It’s a really vicious cycle, so that chestnut is stuck in this biological limbo where it can’t really come back without help. But it’s still out there.
So Michael Veit and some of the beeple in Massachusetts heard about these sprouts that existed up on a couple of mountaintops in western Massachusetts where this tornado had come through, and they went and decided to sample those trees for this Andrena rehni.
Veit: And I was among a small group of people. We rediscovered the bee in Massachusetts. And since then, we have located eight different populations of the bee, most of them in experimental orchards.
Daniel: Orchards like that of the American Chestnut Foundation, a group working hard to develop blight-resistant chestnut trees.
Freinkel: So what those finds in Maryland and in Massachusetts suggested is that this actually is a bee that’s a specialist on chestnuts and perhaps relatives of chestnuts like the chinquapins where Sam found them, or hybrids of American and Chinese or Japanese chestnuts like in the orchards. It’s an example, like, has this bee been out there all along, just nobody was really looking for it because it’s not an economically important bee, it’s not a particularly beautiful bee? Was it once more common and has become a rare bee? Or has it always been a rare, little native bee that was of no count to anybody until people started looking for it?
Daniel: A little bee with a big story. And, unbelievably, here it is, right under Michael's microscope.
Veit: That was the female; here’s the male. You can take a quick look at him if you like.
Daniel: Beautiful.
Veit: He might have some pollen scattered throughout him, but he doesn’t have large concentrations of it.
Daniel: The story of this particular bee ends with some good news. If Andrena rehni, a bee that had gone missing for over a century, could be found on relatives of the embattled American chestnut, then there may still be hope for both species. Sometimes it comes down to cultivating their specialist plants. Here’s Susan again.
Freinkel: I’ve heard that story from folks who got rid of their lawn and planted more pollinator-friendly plants in their backyard. And suddenly they’ve got a circus of bees there. So there is a resilience there. It also requires not just planting bee-friendly plants, but avoiding the use of pesticides and herbicides that are poisonous to bees. Again, we don’t know how deep the damage is, but there are suggestions that it can be undone.
Veit: I’m going to take you back here to my little shed back here.
Daniel: Back outside with Michael, he shows me a series of wooden blocks with holes drilled into them that he’s mounted to the side of his work shed.
Veit: I put these up to encourage cavity nesting bees to nest in my backyard. There’s a number of species of bees and wasps also that nest in those cavities, so they visit here year after year. I get some really interesting bees back here, some not uncommon bees, but interesting bees.
Daniel: What do they mean to you?
Veit: What do they mean to me? I look at bees as a little window into biodiversity. So as a kid, as an adult, I’ve always been intrigued with diversity of life. And insects are a wonderful group to work with if you’re interested in biodiversity, just because there’s so many different kinds of insects, and there’s a lot of different kinds of bees. So bees have opened my eyes to the great world of biodiversity. They take me to wonderful and beautiful places to look and to explore. I have great camaraderie with some really wonderful people and some great mentors in the bee world, so bees mean connecting with those people. And it also means I’ve been doing this long enough that I feel like I’ve been able to make some contributions to science and maybe educate, a little, people about the importance of pollinators and bees and insect conservation in general.
Daniel: Anything else to see outdoors here?
Veit: Geez, I don’t know if there is really anything much to see out there.
Daniel: Not in the middle of winter.
Veit: If you came back in May, there would be lots to see, but not much right here. We can just go up this way.
Daniel: To read Susan’s reporting and learn more about Michael and the beeple and what you can do for native bees in your area, head to SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll also put a link in our show notes.
“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeartRadio app and wherever you get your podcasts.
From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music.
I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.
Man, those muffins were really good. Maybe Michael would give me the re
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Ari Daniel | READ MORE
Ari Daniel, the host of Smithsonian magazine's "There's More to That" podcast, is an independent science journalist who has reported across six continents and contributes regularly to National Public Radio among other outlets. In a previous life, he trained grey seal pups and studied wild Norwegian killer whales.
Filed Under: Agriculture, Bees, Insects, Pollinators, There's More to That, Wildlife