The Bees Next Door

When people picture a bee, they picture a honeybee — hive, queen, honey, the whole operation. But most of the bees actually working your garden aren’t honeybees at all. Oregon has hundreds of native bee species, and the great majority of them are solitary: no hive, no queen, no honey. Just one female, running her own small business. Here are a few of the locals.

🐝 There’s a quiz at the end — twelve questions on what’s below. Jump to the quiz →

The Leafcutter

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This is a leafcutter bee — genus Megachile — and she’s carrying her whole identity on her body. Look at the head: those oversized jaws are scissors. A female leafcutter snips neat, almost perfectly round discs out of leaves (rose leaves are a favorite) and flies each one home to line the cells of her nest, wrapping every egg in its own little green package with a stash of pollen bread. If you’ve ever found rose leaves cut like someone went at them with a hole punch — that wasn’t damage. That was construction.

Now look at her underside. Honeybees pack pollen into tidy baskets on their hind legs; leafcutters don’t have baskets at all. They carry pollen in a dense brush of hairs on the belly — called a scopa — and it’s gloriously messy. That messiness makes them extraordinary pollinators: loose pollen falls off everywhere they go. Researchers reckon a single leafcutter can do the pollinating work of many honeybees.

She is also, like most solitary bees, remarkably gentle. With no hive full of honey to defend and no colony to die for, she has little reason to sting, and rarely does. You can stand a foot away with a macro lens — as I did here — and she’ll simply keep working. There’s something worth admiring in that: a bee with no army, no stores, and no backup, quietly building a future she’ll never see. Every leafcutter you meet is a single mother, doing all of it alone.

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Here she is from the front, hanging off the same yellow blossom against open sky. The first photograph showed her back and that loaded belly brush; this one shows the choppers — the glossy compound eye, the pale-furred face, and underneath it those heavy mandibles. That is the whole toolkit right there: scissors at the front, shopping bag underneath, carried by an insect the size of your fingernail.

And while you’re looking at her face, look at the top of her head. Between and just above the antennae sit three tiny glossy dots in a little triangle. Those are ocelli — simple eyes — and they mean this bee has five eyes, not two. The two big compound eyes on the sides do the actual seeing: motion, shape, color (bees see ultraviolet, and cannot see red at all). But the three ocelli form no image whatsoever. What they read is light — its intensity, and the way it’s polarized across the sky.

That turns out to be two instruments in one. The ocelli give her an artificial horizon, sensing the bright sky above against the dark ground below, which is how a creature this small stays level while flying fast through a cluttered garden. And because they read polarized light, they double as a sun compass — she can find the sun’s position through overcast, on a gray Oregon morning when the sun itself is nowhere to be seen. Five eyes: two for looking, three for knowing which way is up and which way is home.

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Here she is from directly above with her wings spread, and it is worth stopping to count them. There are four — a large forewing and a smaller hindwing on each side. Every bee and every wasp has four; the order name, Hymenoptera, means membrane wing. Anything hovering over your flowers with only two is a fly in costume, which is exactly the trick the impostor at the end of this post is pulling.

But she does not fly with four. Along the leading edge of each hindwing runs a row of minute hooks called hamuli, and when she opens up they catch a folded ridge on the forewing and zip the two together into a single continuous surface. Four wings would interfere with each other and waste energy; two big ones will not. On landing they unhook and fold away separately. It is a mechanical fastener, evolved, on an insect the size of your fingernail — and the only reason you can see four here is that they are currently unzipped.

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And this is what that belly brush looks like when the shift has gone well. Not dusted — packed, the entire underside given over to cargo.

There is a commercial footnote to her messiness that I find quietly satisfying. Leafcutter bees are farmed. Alfalfa growers in particular manage them deliberately, in shelters full of drilled nesting tunnels, because on that crop a leafcutter simply outperforms a honeybee by a wide margin. The scruffy solitary bee nobody has heard of does the job better than the famous one, and agriculture worked that out even if the rest of us have not.

What happens next is worth picturing. She flies this load back to a tunnel, reverses in, and combs the pollen off her belly with her legs into a cell she has already lined with cut leaf. Then nectar, one egg on top, a leaf lid, and out again for the next one. This photograph is a single delivery on a long shift.

The Green Sweat Bee

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This one is a favorite of mine — a green sweat bee on a lavender aster, with nothing behind her but open sky. That metallic green isn’t pigment. It’s structural color: microscopic architecture in the exoskeleton splitting light, the same trick that makes a hummingbird’s throat catch fire at the right angle. A living piece of jewelry, working a flower.

The gold-and-black striped abdomen makes this a male Agapostemon. The females wear metallic green from head to tail; only the males get the striped tuxedo below the shoulders.

Now, about that name. Sweat bees are so called because some species will land on human skin to drink perspiration for its salt — and it’s given the whole family an unfair reputation. For what it’s worth, in all my years of photographing them in Oregon, I’ve never once had one land on me while I was sweating. What I have found is that they’re remarkably peaceful, and fast — they work a flower head in quick, darting bursts and are gone before you’ve refocused. Getting a frame like this one is mostly a matter of patience and luck.

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And this is the female — my best photograph of one, and the other half of the story. No striped tuxedo: she is metallic green from her face to the tip of her abdomen, an emerald against magenta petals, dusted head to foot in gold. Look at her hind legs, thick with pollen. That brush is her scopa, and every grain in it is going home to a nest she dug herself, to feed young she will never live to meet.

Here’s the part I like best, though. That flower is a cosmos, and I grew it from seed in my own garden. Sweat bees adore them. I put a packet of seeds in the dirt, and a few months later something the color of a jewel showed up to work them — and stayed long enough to let me make this picture. That’s the whole bargain, and it’s an absurdly good one: plant the flowers, and they come.

The Honeybee

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And here’s the famous one, so you can see the contrast for yourself. Look at her hind legs: those bulging orange saddlebags are corbiculae — pollen baskets — and they are a marvel of engineering. She combs pollen forward from her whole body, moistens it with a little nectar, and presses it into a smooth, polished brick held in place by a single stiff hair. A full load can run close to a third of her body weight.

Set her beside the leafcutter above and you’ve got the whole story of bees in two photographs. The honeybee is tidy. Every grain is packed away where it can’t be lost, because it’s going home to feed a city of fifty thousand sisters. The leafcutter is messy — loose pollen falling off her belly with every landing. And that mess is precisely why, flower for flower, the scruffy solitary bee is often the better pollinator. Efficiency for the hive isn’t the same thing as efficiency for the garden.

None of which is a knock on her. Every honeybee worker you have ever seen is female, and in the summer she will work herself to death in about six weeks — a life measured out in flowers. She’s also an import, brought here from Europe centuries ago; the leafcutter and the sweat bee were already here.

The Furrow Bee

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This one is a furrow bee — and here’s a small surprise: she’s a close cousin of the green sweat bee above. Both belong to the family Halictidae. One got the metallic armor; this one got crisp bands of pale hair on a dark abdomen and a coat of gold pollen dust on the legs. The long antennae suggest this individual is a male.

An honest note on identification: halictids are a genuinely difficult group. Telling one furrow bee species from another usually takes a specimen under a microscope, not a photograph — so I’ll happily call this a furrow bee and leave the species to the specialists. Even at the family level, though, they’re worth knowing: some furrow bees are solitary, and others are quietly, partially social, sharing a nest entrance while each female tends her own cells. It’s a kind of society scientists are still working out.

Mostly what strikes me is how easy she’d be to miss. No metallic flash, no honeybee fame, no rose leaves cut into circles to give her away. Just a small striped bee doing essential work on a yellow flower, in a garden full of people who never noticed she was there.

The Bumblebee

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This one lives in my backyard, and she is devoted to the pink rhododendrons — I can find her there most spring mornings, shouldering into one blossom after another.

Bumblebees are identified by the pattern of their color bands, and this one gives us a good clue: that rust-orange band across the abdomen, over a yellow thorax with a dark spot between the wings. Put that together with the timing — rhododendrons bloom early, and this is the first bumblebee to appear in the Pacific Northwest each year, with queens sometimes flying in February — and the best answer is Bombus melanopygus, the Black-tailed Bumble Bee. (Its lookalike, B. mixtus, wears its orange at the tail tip instead of mid-body; from this angle I won’t swear to the segment count, so call it a strong probable.)

Bumblebees split the difference between the honeybee and everyone else in this post. They are social — a queen, daughters, a nest, often underground in an abandoned mouse hole — but the colony is small, a few dozen to a few hundred rather than fifty thousand, and it lasts a single season. Come fall, everyone dies except the new queens, who fly off, mate, and sleep alone in the soil all winter. Every bumblebee colony you’ll ever see was started from scratch, in spring, by one female who survived.

They’re also the heavyweight athletes of the group. Big, furry bodies let them fly cold — they warm their flight muscles by shivering and can work at temperatures that ground a honeybee. And they can buzz-pollinate: grabbing a flower and vibrating at a pitch that shakes pollen loose from blossoms that refuse to give it up any other way. Tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries. Honeybees can’t do it. Without bumblebees, a good part of dinner gets harder.

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Here she is again on the same rhododendrons, and look at the petals: every one of them beaded with rain. She could not care less. That’s the whole advantage in one frame — while a honeybee sits out a gray Oregon morning, the bumblebee shivers her flight muscles warm and goes to work anyway. In a place where spring is mostly drizzle, that isn’t a minor detail. It’s why so much of what blooms here gets pollinated at all.

The Wool Carder — The One That Looks Like a Wasp

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If your first thought was wasp, you’re in excellent company — and that’s exactly why almost nobody realizes they’ve met one. The yellow spots running down the sides of the abdomen, the yellow-flecked legs, the relatively bare, shiny body: it reads yellowjacket at a glance.

But look at the hair on her face and thorax. Every one of those pale bristles is branched — plumose, like a microscopic feather. That single feature is what separates every bee on earth from every wasp on earth. Wasps have smooth hair; bees have feathered hair, because feathered hair catches pollen. It is the reason bees pollinate the world and wasps mostly don’t. When you can’t tell a bee from a wasp, stop looking at the stripes and look at the fuzz.

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This second frame shows her feet, and bees turn out to have a rather elegant solution to holding on. At the end of each leg is a pair of hooked tarsal claws for gripping anything rough — bark, leaf edges, a flower’s stem. And folded between the claws is a soft adhesive pad called an arolium, which unfolds to grip smooth, waxy petals where a claw would just skid off. Two gripping systems, deployed automatically depending on what she lands on.

Now the name. Notice the plant she’s holding — the fuzzy leaves, the hairy buds. Wool carder bees are named for what they do to plants like that one: a female lands on a hairy leaf and scrapes the fuzz off with her jaws, rolling it into a little bundle of plant wool, then flies it home to line the cells of her nest. Carding, exactly as in carding wool. She builds her nursery out of felt she makes herself.

And the males — unusually for bees, larger than the females — are the neighborhood bullies. A male picks a patch of good flowers, declares it his, and patrols it all day, ramming any bee that trespasses. He carries spines at the tip of his abdomen and he uses them: he’ll grapple a honeybee or a bumblebee mid-air and drive it off. Almost every other bee in this post is a solitary female quietly minding her own business. The wool carder is the one running a protection racket.

Here’s a female at work, and the golden load tells you so — only females gather pollen. Look closely at her face: that cluster of tiny yellow orbs packed around her jaws and mouthparts is a fresh load, taken straight off the plant’s anthers. Wool carder bees (Anthidium manicatum) collect with dense specialized hairs on the mouthparts and forelegs, working the anthers directly — and then groom that harvest back along the body to a brush of hairs on the underside of the abdomen for the flight home.

That belly brush is a family trait. Wool carders belong to the same family as the leafcutter that opened this post — the Megachilidae — and they all haul pollen the same slightly ridiculous way, underneath rather than in tidy leg baskets, spilling it as they go. All of it is destined for the nest: pollen bread packed into felt-lined cells, food for larvae she will never meet.

Which brings the whole post around in a circle. The tidy honeybee packs her pollen into sealed baskets and loses almost none of it. These scruffy belly-carriers drop it everywhere they land. Two entirely different strategies — and the messy one is quietly better for the garden.

The Long-horned Bee — Named for the Wrong Sex

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This one is new to me, and new to this post. A long-horned bee, genus Melissodes, photographed on an aster at Oaks Bottom in August.

She does not have long horns. That is the first thing to say about her. The name belongs to the males, whose antennae are absurdly long — in some species running nearly the length of the body, sweeping back over the abdomen like something borrowed from a bigger insect. Females get sensible antennae, and something else instead.

They get the legs. Look at the hind leg carrying that load. Her scopa is a dense brush of long hair on the leg, and packed with pollen it makes her look like she is wearing shaggy yellow chaps. Which gives this post all three ways a bee can carry pollen: the honeybee’s damp packed baskets, the leafcutter’s belly brush, and now this — dry pollen tangled into leg hair. Three solutions to one problem, and the two untidy ones are the better pollinators.

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From above you can see the banding, and it is worth knowing those stripes are not markings on the body — they are hair. The abdomen underneath is dark; each pale band is a fringe of short white hairs along the back edge of a segment. Which means they wear off. A fresh bee is furry and crisply striped, and by the end of her season the hair has rubbed away against a thousand flowers and the wing edges have frayed. You can read roughly how much of a bee’s life is behind her from a photograph.

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And then there is the eye. It is pale blue-green with a faint metallic cast, which is genuinely unusual — most bees look out through plain dark brown. A good many long-horned bees have green or blue-green eyes, and it is one of the quiet supporting marks for the identification.

Her timing is not accidental either. Long-horned bees are largely specialists on the aster family — asters, sunflowers, coneflowers, goldenrod — and their entire flight season is timed to it. They emerge in mid to late summer when those flowers open and are finished by autumn. A mason bee in April and a long-horn in August are not competing for anything; they are working different halves of the year, which is one of the better arguments for planting something that blooms late.

She is a solitary ground nester, like the furrow bee. No hive, no workers, nobody to cover for her. She digs a burrow, provisions each cell with a loaf of pollen and nectar, lays one egg on it, seals it, and starts again — and she has weeks, not months, to build the entire next generation. Everything on those legs is groceries for a larva she will never meet.

When I first wrote this section, the male was the one photograph I was missing — the bee with the antennae that gave the whole genus its name. I went back to the same asters and found him.

And Here He Is

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That is the feature. Those antennae run nearly the length of his body, and in flight they trail behind him like streamers. He was on Douglas aster — Symphyotrichum subspicatum, the common native purple aster of the Willamette Valley — at Oaks Bottom, in August. Notice the disc florets going brown beneath him. The season is nearly over, and that matters.

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His legs are clean. Completely clean — not lightly dusted, not partly loaded. Empty.

That is not laziness, it is anatomy. He has no scopa — none of the dense pollen-carrying brushes the female wears on her hind legs. He physically cannot carry pollen. No male bee of this kind ever has, and no male ever will.

Which becomes obvious the moment you put her next to him.

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Short antennae. Green-striped eyes. And a hind leg carrying so much pollen it has changed her outline. She is dusted with it across the thorax and face as well, because she has been shouldering into flower after flower all day.

I spent an afternoon watching both. The females work at a pace I have genuinely not seen in any other bee — flower to flower without pause, packing pollen, gone. Every one of them is digging and provisioning a nest alone, against an aster bloom that has maybe six weeks left in it. There is no colony to cover for her and no second chance next month.

The males drift. They fly noticeably slower, they wander the patch, and they are, frankly, a little comical about it. They remind me of male hummingbirds — all flash and ornament while somebody else does the work.

And here is the detail that makes it funnier. The loaded female is faster than the empty male. She is hauling close to her own body weight in pollen and she still outruns him. He has no cargo, no burrow, nothing to deliver anywhere. He flies slowly because he has nowhere in particular to be.

Though in fairness to him, the loitering is the strategy. Every receptive female in the neighborhood has to come to these asters, because this is where the pollen is. He is not at a restaurant. He is waiting at the one place in the valley where the females are guaranteed to turn up — and those ridiculous antennae are covered in receptors for detecting her scent before any rival does. It is the same evolutionary logic as a hummingbird’s throat: ornament that looks absurd and works.

Still missing, and I will keep trying: the males sleeping. They spend the night out in the open, clamped to a stem by their jaws, sometimes several lined up along the same stalk like laundry. That is the next photograph.

The One I’ve Known Longest

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And this is the big one — the bumblebee most people in Portland picture when they picture a bumblebee. Bombus vosnesenskii, the Yellow-faced Bumble Bee: black, substantial, with a yellow face and a single bright band across the abdomen. She’s our most abundant species and one of our largest, and here she’s flying in with a full orange pollen basket on her hind leg.

The flower matters too. That’s camas — a Pacific Northwest native whose bulbs were among the most important food plants of the Indigenous peoples of this region, harvested from meadows for thousands of years. A native bee flying into a native flower. That partnership is older than Portland, older than Oregon, older than any of us.

I’ve known these bees for more than fifty years. They were in the yards of my childhood and they’re in my garden now, and I’ve spent a good part of that time simply watching them. One thing they do has always stayed with me: sometimes a bumblebee will fly slow circles around you — just orbiting, taking your measure, entirely unbothered. It has never once felt threatening. It feels like being looked in on. Like something small and golden is drawing a ring of protection around you before carrying on with her day. I know how that sounds. It still makes me smile every single time.

And it turns out I’m in old company with that feeling. Bees have carried more folklore than almost any other creature. Across Europe they were thought to be messengers between this world and the next — carriers of souls, bringers of news — and a bee that came to you, landed on you, or entered your house was widely held to be a good omen: luck arriving, or word from someone far away. The Greeks went further still; the priestesses of the Delphic oracle were called Melissae, “the bees,” and honey was the food of prophecy.

My favorite of these traditions is a custom called “telling the bees.” In parts of Britain and old New England, a family was expected to go out to the hives and inform them of every important event in the household — a birth, a marriage, and above all a death. Sometimes the hives were draped in black crepe. The belief was that bees left uninformed would grieve, fall silent, stop producing, or simply leave. It sounds like superstition, and maybe it is. But look at what it assumes: that the bees are part of the family, and owed the truth.

Fifty years of watching them, and I don’t find that hard to understand at all.

Fifty years, too, and I’ve never once been stung by one.

One Last Thing — The Impostor

After all that, here’s one from my own garden that isn’t a bee at all. It’s a hoverfly — a fly, plain and simple — and it is wearing a costume.

Look at what it’s counterfeiting: the bold yellow-and-black banding, the striped thorax, the whole aggressive yellowjacket advertisement. Now look for the tells. Count the wings. A bee or a wasp has four. This has two — that’s what the name of the whole fly order means, Diptera, “two wings.” Then look at the eyes: enormous, wrapping most of the head, nothing like a bee’s narrow ovals. And the waist — a wasp is pinched sharply in the middle, while this abdomen joins broadly to the thorax. Finally, the fuzz that gave the wool carder away is simply missing. Smooth, shining, hairless.

Here’s the beautiful part: this insect has no sting, no bite, and no defense whatsoever. It is completely harmless. The costume is the entire strategy. Generations of birds learned that yellow-and-black means pain, and the hoverfly — which never paid that tuition — simply borrowed the reputation. Biologists call it Batesian mimicry: an innocent species advertising a threat it can’t back up, and getting left alone anyway.

Those two missing wings are worth one more moment, because evolution didn’t discard them. It repurposed them. A fly’s hind wings shrank into tiny knobbed organs called halteres that beat in time with the real wings and work as gyroscopes, feeding the insect constant information about pitch, roll and yaw. That’s why a hoverfly can hang stock-still in mid-air like a helicopter, then vanish sideways — a trick no bee can match. If you see something hovering perfectly motionless over your flowers, you’re almost certainly looking at a fly.

And after all that deception, the punchline: hoverflies are good, and they get almost none of the credit for it. They are the second most important group of pollinators on earth after bees — they work flowers all day, they’ll fly in cool and overcast weather, and they visit an enormous range of blooms. They even out-travel the bees: some hoverfly species migrate in staggering numbers, hundreds of millions of individuals moving across a continent in a season, carrying pollen distances no bee will ever cover.

And the larvae of many species are ferocious aphid predators — one grub can eat hundreds of aphids before it pupates. So the fraud in the wasp suit is pollinating your garden and handling your pest control, for free, while everyone who notices it either mistakes it for a bee or swats at it for being a fly. Nobody sends the hoverfly a thank-you note.

Which feels like the right note to end on. A post full of bees that nobody recognizes as bees, finishing with a fly that everybody mistakes for one. The garden is busier, stranger, and more crowded with characters than it looks. Go stand in it for ten minutes and see who shows up. 🐝

Quiz: Do You Know Your Bees?

Twelve questions, and every answer is somewhere above. No pressure — nobody’s grading you but the bees.