Native Bee Species Ebb and Flow with Native Plants Bloom: A Year’s Calendar with Sam Droege, watch webinar
Zoom Video Conference
Held Thursday, 14 May 2020
Watch recorded presentation
All of our nearly 500 species of native bees are dependent on pollen to feed their young. No flowers, no bees. Like flowers, each bee species has its season. During a bee’s flight time they are often dependent on the pollen from only a small group of plants, ignoring the rest.
What you plant has consequences for the bees you support on your property. Travel through a year in the region, tracking the flowers and their bees, or…the bees and their flowers (depending on your point of view!)
Sam Droege has been spent most of his career at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird Survey Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the BioBlitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs and worked on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs. Currently he is developing an inventory and monitoring program for native bees, online identification guides for North American bees at www.discoverlife.org, and with Jessica Zelt reviving the North American Bird Phenology Program. His group maintains high resolution photographs of insects and other macro natural history objects at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/.
Continuing education credit available for master naturalists.
I thought North America had 4000 species of native bees.
I contacted Sam Droege and he replied: Regionally, most of the mid atlantic states have about 450 known species. Together there are roughly 500 species in the mid-atlantic and each state is regularly adding additional species.
In North American there are roughly 3600 names for bee species. Some are probably synonyms or even bogus…and then there are an additional few hundred bees that don’t have names…thus the 4000 or so is reasonable.