Going pesticide free is an important step in nurturing bees in your garden. Pesticide exposure is one of the dangers facing our native bee species. While most gardeners might be able to identify a bumble bee or a honey bee, there are many other types of bees worth discovering.
Identifying bees is the first step in valuing them and appreciating the work they do. Diversity is the key to habitat stability and our native bees are an important part of the equation. Many types of bees are specialized pollinators, perfectly designed to pollinate very specific plants. We need wild bees not only because in many cases they’re more efficient pollinators than imported European honey bees, but also because they’ve co-evolved with our native plants. These native pollinators are critical for pollinating both wild and cultivated plants, and sadly, many of them are facing dramatic population declines due to loss of foraging and nesting habitats, pesticide exposure, and various pathogens and parasites. While you might not think identifying and learning about common backyard bees is important, nothing could be further from the truth. But how many other bee species can you name? Why identifying different kinds of bees is important Bumble bees are among the most easily recognized North American bees. Today, I’d like to introduce you to several kinds of bees I commonly find in my own backyard. From the tiniest sweat bee to the largest carpenter bee, the diversity of bees found in our yards and gardens is pretty incredible. Certainly some types of bees are more common than others, depending on where you live and the type of plants you grow. There are over 20,000 bee species in the world, with about 4,000 of them occurring in North America.
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