Bees
From honey bee hives to solitary bees nesting in bare ground, bees are the most important pollinators on Earth. These guides cover species identification, nesting habits, and what keeps them coming back to a garden.
If a bee is near you, it's working, not hunting. Plant more flowers and it will repay you.
Size
6 to 25 mm
sweat bees to bumblebee queens
Diet
Nectar and pollen
nothing else
Habitat
Flowers and bare ground
beds, orchards, hedgerows
Sting
Females, in defense
most never bother
Species
Around 20,000
most of them solitary
Life cycle
From honey bees to bumblebees, every bee runs through the same four stages inside the nest.
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Egg A single white egg stood upright in the base of a wax cell; it hatches in about three days.
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Larva A white grub curled in its cell, fed constantly by workers until the cell is capped.
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Pupa Sealed inside the capped cell, it rebuilds into an adult over one to two weeks.
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Adult It chews its way out and gets straight to work; a summer worker lives about six weeks.
Nearly every "bee sting" story readers send me turns out to be yellowjacket work. In all my summers photographing bees at point-blank range I've been stung twice, and both times I sat on the bee. Give a working bee a foot of space and it could not care less about you.
Sam Fielding · field note · about Sam
Typical season
Most of the US; nearly year-round in the far south, a month or two shorter up north.
Often confused with
Hoverflies
Two wings instead of four, hovers on the spot, and carries no sting at all
Wasps & Hornets
Slimmer waist, shiny rather than fuzzy, and interested in your lunch; bees never are
A honey bee's entire lifetime of work adds up to about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
Honey Bees
The hive one. Golden-brown, slimmer than a bumblebee, and always mid-errand: a single colony can run to 50,000 workers. Methodical flower visits near a hive or wall cavity mean this one.
Start here
A bumblebee shivers its flight muscles up to working temperature before takeoff, which is why you'll find them trembling on cool mornings.
Bumblebees
The big fuzzy one. Round, loud, and gentle to a fault: a bumblebee has to be handled roughly before it considers stinging. Small colonies of a few hundred, usually underground.