Amanda Bratcher (NC Cooperative Extension, the state’s census coordinator) works through five of the seven bee families and the field cues that separate a small bee from a wasp or a fly — four clear wings vs. two, the fly’s club-shaped halteres, the wasp’s pinched waist, the pollen-carrying scopa that mark a female bee. Dr. Kris Braman (UGA, professor emerita of entomology) then shares her lab’s urban-bee research: a 50-property study that turned up 111 species, why Georgia bees are heavily forest-associated, and why “plant more trees for the bees” is the through-line.
Week Four of the Great Southeast Pollinator Course. For the census, a “small bee” is anything at or below honey bee size — the box volunteers find hardest to fill. North Carolina has close to 600 bee species; Georgia around 540. The census runs August 21–22, 2026.
Educators attending the live session earned 1 PLU. This is the archived recording (no credit).
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Chapters
0:00 Welcome and speaker introductions
1:37 Amanda Bratcher: why small bees matter
2:21 A backyard taken over by ground-nesting bees
4:40 What counts as a small bee — the ‘wrong bees’ problem
6:21 Building bee ID skills; ~600 NC species
8:04 Bees within Hymenoptera: wasps, ants, and true bees
9:38 The five main bee families and free ID guides
12:15 ID clues: pollen hairs (scopa) and wing venation
13:37 Telling male from female bees
14:47 Apidae and Megachilidae: fuzzy bees, leafcutters, masons
16:59 Mining bees, sweat bees, and cellophane bees
21:36 Telling bees from wasps
22:49 Telling bees from flies (halteres)
24:41 Small bee life cycle and metamorphosis
26:17 Where small bees nest; trimming stems
27:11 Solitary, social, and cuckoo bees
28:23 Q&A with Amanda: sweat bees, cuckoo bees, stems
34:19 Introducing Dr. Kris Braman
36:14 Small bees as urban VIPs
39:03 50-property study: 111 species and the value of forests
41:45 Athens eight-site study: forest edge vs. interior
42:47 What kind of bees live in cities?
45:28 Andrena and Nomada bees
47:50 A ground-nesting bee spectacle (video)
48:52 Do bee houses help? Exotic bees take over
51:19 Leafcutter leaf damage and tolerating messiness
53:10 Asian needle ant and wood-nesting bee decline
53:59 Flowers for tough sites: 33x more bees
55:33 Bee-to-flower networks
57:58 Grasses and specialist bees
59:26 Five simple things to help bees
1:01:02 Choosing flowers and native plants
1:03:58 Helping people adopt conservation
1:04:43 Q&A: soil for ground-nesting bees
1:05:57 More Q&A: coneflower damage and bee houses
1:07:42 Stem-cutting explained (Amanda)
1:10:07 What early-spring bees eat: trees for the bees
1:11:00 Closing and next week: Honey Bees
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Questions Answered in This Session
Why are they called sweat bees?
They’re drawn to the salt in human sweat and land on your arms to harvest it — which is how people usually meet them, and where the name comes from.
How do I tell a small bee from a wasp?
Wasps are generally hairless with a very thin, sharply pinched waist, because they aren’t carrying pollen for their young. Bees carry pollen hairs and often fold their wings when perched (though Amanda notes the wing-folding cue isn’t universal).
How do I tell a bee from a fly?
A fly has two wings plus a pair of club-shaped halteres behind them; a bee has four clear wings. Flies also have large eyes covering most of the head, very short antennae, and a faster, jerkier flight.
Where do most small bees nest?
Most nest in the soil — about 70% of North Carolina species — with fewer in wood and stems. Even ground-nesters that cluster in aggregations are usually solitary “single mamas” nesting near one another.
Do bee houses actually help native bees?
They fill up, but Braman’s studies found the boxes dominated by exotics — the giant resin bee (Megachile sculpturalis) and the mason bee Osmia taurus — not the native community. Don’t leave houses up too long, since parasites like Melittobia wasps build up.
Which flowers bring the most bees to a tough or eroded site?
Black-eyed Susan, partridge pea, rattlesnake master, coreopsis, and mountain mint all established well. Adding those flowers drew 33 times more bees than grass alone, with Lasioglossum, Halictus, and Bombus most abundant.
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Resources
Bees of North Carolina: An Identification Guide — Youngsteadt & Levenson; free PDF online, or ~$10 in print from UNC Press
The Bees in Your Backyard — plain-English field reference with photographs
The Solitary Bees — more technical reference on solitary-bee diversity
Sam Droege / USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab — source of the bee macro-photography shown
discoverlife.org — state-by-state bee species checklists
Great Southeast Pollinator Census: August 21–22, 2026
Great Southeast Pollinator Course — UGA Center for Urban Agriculture