Speakers: Amanda Bratcher, Horticulture Agent, NC Cooperative Extension (Lee County Center, Sanford NC) — NC State Coordinator, Great Southeast Pollinator Census; Dr. Kris Braman, Professor Emerita of Entomology, University of Georgia
Moderator / Host: Becky Griffin, UGA Extension (co-host: Rich Braman)
Duration: 1:12:05
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Webinar Date: July 7, 2026
Introduction
Becky Griffin: Thank you all for joining us today. I am very excited, Rich. Today I have on my Center for Urban Ag hat. I had somebody email me today wanting to know what hat I was going to wear. I’m also repping The Bee Cause, which is a partner for us that actually does work in education on bees. So I thought it was perfect for today, when today we’re discussing small bees. And I’m really excited about that because it’s one of my favorite topics. And I get to introduce our first speaker here.
Our first speaker is Amanda. She is the horticulture agent at NC State Extension, Lee County Center, and she is the North Carolina State Coordinator for the census. So she and I get to work together quite a bit. She serves everyone from home gardeners to farmers to nursery people and even wild things in her role. If they need help with plants that aren’t field crops or pasture, she is the woman for that. She has been with NC State for three years and worked in botanical gardens for more than 10 before that. She has a passion for plants and pollinators and is excited to work with the Extension Master Gardener Volunteers of Lee County to manage the pollinator haven garden at the extension office in Sanford. Also, I happen to know that she got her master’s degree in Scotland. So that’s just a little added bonus fact. Welcome, Amanda. I’m going to stop sharing and the floor is yours.
Amanda Bratcher: Thank you, Becky. Oh, goodness. I am so excited to talk about small bees. They are my favorite. I know, Becky, yours is the bumblebees, but I have to say the small bees are pretty, pretty awesome. Let’s get the show on the road.
Why Small Bees Matter
Amanda Bratcher: So that is a little taste of a yard that has been taken over by ground nesting bees here in Lee County, North Carolina. And to me, that was one of the most religious experiences of my career so far in extension, just standing, sitting among all of these bees and listening to them buzz and watching them travel through these yards. And, you know, as you start paying attention during the census, you’re going to start noticing all of the diversity of bees that are visiting your plants. And so we’re going to hopefully give you a little bit of a taste of what you might be seeing when you’re checking that box for small bees.
So I am the horticulture agent for North Carolina Cooperative Extension. And at NC State Extension, our job is to extend research-based knowledge to all North Carolinians, helping them transform science into everyday solutions that improve their lives and grow our state. And as a horticulture agent, I get to work with the Extension Master Gardener volunteers. And throughout the Southeast, the Great Southeast Pollinator Census is supported by the Master Gardener programs in the states we work with, and especially in North Carolina. So I always love to give a shout out to my Master Gardener volunteers who help expand and increase our capacity.
I always like to remind folks that pollinators are essential and everyone should care. And you guys are here, so I’m preaching to the audience a little bit, but I challenge you in your census journey to remind people about how important pollinators are. Not just honeybees, not just bumblebees, but these small bees that we’re going to talk about today. They are critical to food security. They are economically important. They’re critical to ecosystem health. And as you continue to participate in the census and other community science projects and you watch these small organisms go through their lives on these amazing plants, I know for me personally, it brings me great joy to see them. And ultimately, they do make me feel more connected to nature and to my local community. And ultimately, they are important for the future. I always have to give a shout out to my daughter — and what I do in my job and what I do with the education that I provide for folks is ultimately to hopefully make the world even better for her.
What Counts as a Small Bee
Amanda Bratcher: So what are you looking for when you’re doing the census? So far we have talked about carpenter bees and bumblebees and honeybees and all the bright, shiny bees that most people recognize. And then we have a little box down here for small bees. And it’s smaller than anything. But I was reminded, back in January, the Washington Post did this article. It said, good news, we saved the bees. Bad news, we saved the wrong ones. And ultimately, a lot of the comments were, wait a second, why did no one tell us the honeybees were not the ones that we should be focusing on? And that, for me, was really telling that there’s still a lot of education that needs to go into raising awareness about the other bees.
So for the census, it’s anything smaller than a honeybee, or maybe sometimes as close to a honeybee. You really get to know your insect identification skills and those characteristics that you’re looking for when you start participating in the census. And I want to say something here. As the state coordinator for North Carolina, I get a lot of people who are very worried about misidentifying something and getting it wrong. And this is not about getting it wrong. This is about practice. Practice looking at these bees, practice getting to know them, and eventually you will learn them just like you learn the plants that you have in your garden.
So they are not a single family, and they are incredibly diverse. If you look here, this is a picture of a long-horned bee, which is one of my favorites. Actually, I think this is my favorite. This is a male bee. And you can see he’s actually really close to this bumblebee here in terms of size and kind of fuzziness. So as you start to look more and more at these bees, those initial characteristics that we talk about with insect ID, you lay the scaffolding, you build your bookshelves, and then eventually you file away more of those characteristics. I will be the first person to tell you I am not an entomologist. I am a horticulturist. I grow plants. My training is in the taxonomy and biodiversity of plants. But the skills for learning plants are very similar to insects. It’s just a different set of words, but the skills are the same. So if the census is totally new to you, if insects are totally new to you, that is okay. You are at the beginning of your learning journey. So come along with us.
Recognizing Bees: Hymenoptera and Identification Basics
Amanda Bratcher: So there’s incredible diversity in the bees. I am speaking a lot from North Carolina, but a lot of it is very similar across the Southeast. In North Carolina, we’ve got close to 600 different species of bees, but that’s including the carpenter bees, the honeybee, and the bumblebees. If you look at these wonderful pictures that were taken by Sam Droege at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bee Lab in Maryland, there’s just so many different shapes, colors, sizes. Some of them may look like wasps, and I may challenge a couple of y’all on what you may think you know about bees today — not to say that you should freeze up, but just to pay more attention.
So I did want to raise awareness that these bees are in the order Hymenoptera, which includes wasps and ants. And there’s about 150,000 species of Hymenoptera around the world and only about 20,000 true bees, and then about 4,000 true bees in North America. And the way you know these guys is they typically will have chewing mouth parts, and they have four wings, and they’re going to be clear. Hymen means clear wing or membranous wing. They typically have long or elbowed antennae, so they’re not going to be short like a fly. Females have ovipositors — sometimes we know those for their sting — and they have a varied diet, though bees are pollen eaters and nectar eaters. They do not eat other insects. They’re the vegetarian wasps of the world, is the way that I learned them. They do sometimes have a narrowing between the thorax and the abdomen, even in the case of bees versus wasps. So don’t always lean on that when you’re telling the difference between bees and wasps.
So here’s just a little taste of the small bees. Comparing them side by side, you can tell they have a highly varied preference on what they like to eat, what they look like, their shapes, colors, and sizes. So we’re going to delve into five of the seven bee families and hopefully get you a little bit of a taste of each of these, so that when Kris takes over, you have this frame of reference for the research she’s going to talk about. And I love this graphic from the Museum of Life. It talks about how bees have evolved through time. The main ones that we’re going to talk about today are the Apidae, the Megachilidae, Andrenidae, Halictidae, and Colletidae. As you can see, the Apidae here — 152 species in North Carolina alone. Andrenidae, 130. Halictidae, 133 species. So a lot.
I’m going to use some technical words today, and I’m going to probably go too fast for everybody. This is an excellent guide for folks. If you are listening to me and you’re trying to take notes, please don’t worry. Drs. Elsa Youngsteadt and Hannah Levenson have published the Bees of North Carolina Identification Guide. It’s available for free as a PDF online, and you can order a copy of it for a little over 10 bucks from UNC Press. It was originally created for a workshop that they did for agents and master gardeners. It is an incredibly accessible reference, especially as you’re starting to learn the terminology. One thing you will learn is that these are small organisms. You’re going to have to get very good with a hand lens and a magnifying glass if you’re going to see the identification characteristics between the different families. If you’re using a hand lens, you hold it up to your eye and you bring it close to the thing you’re looking at. When you’re using a magnifying glass, you put it up to the thing you’re looking at and pull it closer to you to see it easier. I highly recommend looking at pinned specimens with a magnifying glass and a hand lens and just start becoming familiar with the characteristics that you’re looking for.
So here is one of the lovely line drawings that entomologists are very famous for doing about insects. This is from page 47 of Bees of North Carolina. There are several amazing online entomological groups that have really great line drawings available for usage. And in the true sense of a nerd, there is a term for every single part of the face and the wings. For bees, many of these different parts have characteristics that will indicate what genus and species they are. On page two, Hannah and Elsa have done an excellent job to look at three big characteristics that, as you’re learning these bees, can help you.
The first one is: where are the pollen-carrying hairs on the female bees? Female bees are the ones that are going to be gathering pollen, because they are trying to gather it to feed their young. The male bees are typically only out and about foraging for nectar to fuel their lovemaking. So you want to find where those scopa are. Sometimes they’ll be on the abdomen, sometimes they’ll be on the hind leg. And in the case of things in the Apidae, they’re going to have a special corbicula — special hairs that Becky has talked about in the past. Wing venation is crazy when it comes to these small bees. Bless the entomologists’ hearts who have looked at the wing venation of these different genera and species. The shape of these recurrent veins and how many submarginal cells they have is going to tell you what family and genus things are in. Same with the basal vein — the shape of it is going to get you to the genus. Now, you participating in the census, there is no way for you to tell those things apart. And that’s why Becky has simplified the small bee category into just small bees. But as you continue to grow your knowledge, learning to pin insects and look at pinned collections, you can pull these insects out and look at them under microscopes and hand lenses and start to look for these characteristics.
Figuring out male versus female bees can be kind of challenging, because again, they can look fairly similar. But I did want to mention: if they have a stinger, it’s going to be a female. Most of all bees are going to have hairs on them, but the pollen-carrying hairs is what’s going to be the differential between a male and a female bee. You cannot count the antennal segments when they’re flying around, nor can you count the tergites, which is on the abdomen — the back part of the bee. Sometimes you can see facial markings, and typically the males are going to have more hair. Adult men have beards, so do adult bees. But it’s not always a universal characteristic. It can help you narrow things down.
A Tour of Five Bee Families
Apidae — The Cuddly Ones
Amanda Bratcher: So the first family is one that you probably are going to recognize, the Apidae. I call these the cuddly ones, because — really, Hannah and Elsa say, if you don’t know what it is, it’s probably in this one. They typically have lots of hairs on them and are very familiar to us in that they look kind of bumblebee-like. Now, that bee looked like a bumblebee, but it was a hibiscus bee. It doesn’t have corbicula on it — I did catch it, so I do know it wasn’t a bumblebee. But some of these have very cool specialties, like the longhorn bees here, which is what we have in this picture. The digger bees, Anthophora, Habropoda — these are blueberry bees, if you’ve ever heard of those. The small carpenter bees. We’ll mention a couple of groups of cuckoo bees, and I’ll talk about those in a little bit. And then the zebra cuckoo bees are kind of cool, and Nomada. These last two groups look very wasp-like, but they have characteristics that put them in the Apidae. Here’s another one of my little favorite longhorn bees here on a Monarda.
Megachilidae — Leafcutter and Mason Bees
Amanda Bratcher: The next group is also highly recognizable, the Megachilidae. These are the leafcutter or mason, potter, or cuckoo bees. And they have a very distinct rounded abdomen. This is the third end part, the butt part, as I like to tell the children. They typically are going to have more of a cigar or submarine shape. Also, resin bees are in this group. The sharp-tailed bees — I was talking, just before I walked in for this webinar, that I saw a sharp-tailed bee in our garden. Osmia is another one that’s really famous. Those are the blue orchard bees that are very important for early-season pollination. We also do have an invasive leafcutter bee, a sculptured resin bee, which is here in the bottom left. If you’ll notice, this picture here in the top left is a Megachilidae — it is a leafcutter bee. It looks a lot like a [VERIFY: "gulidae" — garbled in source audio]. It is a carpenter bee mimic, and it is smaller. If you saw it, it would look like a baby. Remember, there’s no baby bees. If you see a bee flying around, it’s always an adult, but it’s going to be much smaller. The abdomen is going to be very small and round.
Andrenidae — Mining Bees
Amanda Bratcher: The next group we have are the Andrenidae, the mining bees. These are ground-nesting bees. These are the ones that you see nesting in aggregations. The video that I showed you before were these Andrenidae, but also the Perdita, the fairy bees. These are the smallest bees, and I’ll show you some pictures of those, and Calliopsis is another group. But these are not the only genera. They are short-tongued bees, and there’s some other characteristics that can get you to the genera. Another one of my favorite books I’ll talk about later can help you with some of those. So here’s one of the fairy bees. I want to give a shout out to Bill Rodstrom; this is his iNaturalist observation from Apple Valley, California. If anybody has pulled up prostrate spurge in their garden — that’s essentially what this bee is on. They are incredibly, incredibly tiny. They’re smaller than the writing on a penny.
Halictidae — Sweat Bees
Amanda Bratcher: The next one I’ll talk about are the sweat bees, and these are incredibly diverse as well. The green sweat bees are definitely the ones that people probably notice the most. They have a really interesting green metallic body. They’re very gregarious. You’re going to see them a lot of times on things in the sunflower family. Agapostemon is what I’ve got a picture of here — this is inside of a morning glory flower. But there’s some other Agapostemon which look very similar to the green sweat bee, with some different characteristics. Here, on this milkweed, we have Lasioglossum. Let me see if anybody can see it — she’s right here on this one little flower. The only reason that I saw that is I was taking a picture of a bumblebee that was foraging from this common milkweed, and she just happened to be flying around angrily when the bumblebee kind of bumbled over her. Bless his little heart.
We also have the classic sweat bees, this little guy here. And Kris, I’m kind of curious to make sure I got my identification right — but one of the ways that you can tell you have a Halictidae, the sweat bee, is these colored bands here. These colored bands are hairs, and they’re very, very defined, where some other bees that kind of have this look may not have these defined hair bands on the abdomen. So she can correct me when she pops on.
Colletidae — Cellophane and Yellow-Faced Bees
Amanda Bratcher: This is one of my favorites, the cellophane bees. There’s some really incredible stories about these. These are some cellophane bees that were present here in Lee County at one of our county parks right along the edge of a creek that floods — a perfect floodplain. These guys are famous for literally having a special enzyme or chemical that they can produce from their bodies that is very similar to cellophane, that will seal their babies and the pollen provision inside of their nests, and they can be submerged without any kind of loss and rot. Also in this group are the Hylaeus, the yellow-faced bees. This group is really unique. This is a picture of one here — it almost looks like a wasp.
One of the things that I can tell you is, if you’re trying to tell the difference between a wasp and a bee, a lot of times the bees will kind of fold their wings, whereas the wasps don’t generally fold their wings. Now, that’s not always true, but it does help. The Hylaeus are interesting in that they do still collect pollen, but they don’t have pollen-collecting hairs on their bodies. They eat the pollen and the nectar and they mix it in their bellies and then regurgitate it back out.
So now that we’ve gone through that incredibly quickly, do you even know what you’re looking at now? I hope that this has expanded your mind. There is no expectation. If this is the first time you’re learning about these different families, this is just dipping your toe into the water and giving you some tools to start your small bee identification journey. Here are some excellent resources. These will be available to you on the website, so you can buy them or get copies of them from your local library. The Bees in Your Backyard is certainly one of my favorites. It is written in plain English and has some amazing pictures. And this other one, The Solitary Bees — if you are an entomologist, I’ve read a few of the chapters in that, and it is definitely highly technical, but also still accessible and interesting, and truly talks about the diversity of the solitary bees, which most of them are considered small bees.
Telling Bees from Wasps and Flies
Amanda Bratcher: Now that we’ve maybe added a layer of confusion, one of the groups that some of the small bees — especially the yellow-faced bees and the sweat bees — may be confused with are the wasps. With wasps, they are generally hairless, and they’re going to have very, very thin waists. So even though the bees have this area where the abdomen and the thorax come together, the wasps are going to be much, much more defined. I asked Elsa, after a workshop that I did with her, how can you tell the difference between all these different bees and wasps? And she said, the more you watch them and observe them, you can start to tell the difference in the species not just by their identification characteristics, but also by their behaviors and where you find them. And I find that that’s very true about the wasps as well. So you’re looking for that really strong wasp waist — thin, thin waist — and generally hairless, because they’re not gathering pollen for their young. They are typically going to be foraging for nectar on flowers and then looking for prey to feed their babies.
Oh, uh-oh — my fly slide got messed up. So flies are another one that you can get messed up with a little bit between the small bees and the flies. And flies are highly diverse as well, incredibly, actually more diverse in some cases than bees. This is one of my favorite flies. This is the conopid fly, and this is a parasitoid on bumblebees. They use their wasp-like abdomen to pry open the abdomen of the bumblebees to lay their eggs inside. So it kind of looks like a wasp, kind of looks like a fly. But what you’re looking at is, it only has two wings. And it has these really cool things called halteres — here are the halteres here. They look like little clubs on the back of their wings, or underneath their wings. This one also has a pretty long antenna for a fly, but most of the flies are going to have very, very short antennae, very similar to this flower fly here in depiction D. So remember, flies only have two wings, and they’re going to have a very jerky flight pattern, and they’re going to be much faster than the bees. They’re also going to have larger eyes that take up most of their heads, and that smaller antenna. So you’re looking for that combination of characteristics when you’re trying to say, is this a bee, or is this a wasp, or a small bee, or a fly.
And these pictures that I just showed you — I made a North Carolina version of the insect counting and identification guide. It is available for free for anybody to use, and that will be part of the information that I share with Becky.
Life Cycle, Nesting, and Social Behavior
Amanda Bratcher: So ultimately, whenever you’re trying to identify these bees, you want to start to understand their life cycles. They undergo complete metamorphosis, like a lot of our other pollinator groups. They are in their egg stage, and they have to have that pollen provision. Different bees have different pollen provision types. Some of them are solid that look like bee bread, very similar to this carpenter bee, and some of them are almost liquid, and the little egg is kind of floating on top of it. The different species have different formulas and different recipes for their bee bread. And then they develop from larvae, eating their pollen provision at different times of year. They are pupating as a pupa, and this can be highly variable with the small bees. And then the adults are emerging and foraging for pollen and nectar and trying to find nesting material. A lot of them are spending most of the year out of sight and out of mind. So here, for example, is a life cycle of one bee. She’s very active — she emerges as an adult in early spring. And by the end of spring, beginning of summer, she’s a pupa, a pre-pupa. And throughout summer, fall, and winter, she continues to pupate. So 75% of the time, she’s actually a pupa, usually underground or in a stem.
So with these small bees, diversity is the spice of life — and that’s what Kris is going to talk about. But I always remind folks to provide the basics: food, water, and shelter. And if you want to see some cool small bees, definitely remember to plant and observe your oregano or your marjoram. We have a couple of different species of oregano in our garden, and I always see leafcutter bees. The leafcutter bees in our area love the oregano.
And where they’re living is in the soil. In fact, this says 70% of species — but this is for North Carolina — but they’re also in wood and stems, and not so much in cavities. Some, but most of the small bees are going to be living in soil, a little bit in wood and stems. A little bit of a research highlight, because Kris is going to cover this, but I did want to give a shout out to Elsa and Hannah: we did some research on perennial stem management and found out that it’s better to trim stems in that first winter. And if you want to delve into more, you can participate in the ground-nesting bee study if you find a ground-nesting bee aggregation.
So most of them are going to be solitary. Usually, even if they’re nesting in these aggregations, they’re single mamas and they just happen to nest together. Some of them are social, but it is definitely less common in the group. And then the rest are brood parasites. These are still not eating each other, but typically some of these will lay their eggs next to the pollen provisions, and the larva will kill the larva of the other organism and then eat the pollen. Or sometimes they’ll just outright kill the queen and take over their nest. So there’s some really interesting life histories even in the small bees. Ultimately, in your yard and in your communities, you can make a difference even for these little guys. This is another one of my little favorites — this is a little long-horned bee on a Boltonia in my yard. He’s come back for two years, or the species has been seen for two years in my yard, and I’ve lived there for four years, so it’s very exciting. There’s definitely some management practices that Kris is going to talk about that you can change to encourage more of these to utilize your garden. And ultimately, as you begin to see these bees, share it with your community — the more people can see them, the more they’re going to appreciate them. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
Questions and Answers with Amanda
Becky Griffin: You are right on time. Very good, Amanda. That was amazing. I took lots of notes, and I sure appreciate your pictures. We’re going to take a few minutes, if you don’t mind — maybe take a sip of water — and we are going to do some questions.
Sweat Bees and Their Behavior
Becky Griffin: Kathy Schultz wants to know, why are they called sweat bees?
Amanda Bratcher: Because typically people have run into them harvesting salt off of their arms when they’re sweating. They do gather salt.
Becky Griffin: Steve says that the green sweat bee always seemed more aggressive than other bees, and now he sees them in his landscape and they’re pretty chill.
Amanda Bratcher: I think it just depends on the species and what you’re observing them on, and maybe the circumstances that you were observing them under. Whenever I’ve observed the Agapostemon that I’ve seen, they tend to be much more frantic than the other ones. They’re really hard to take pictures of, very hard to capture. But yeah, they have just a different kind of thing about them.
Species Differences Between States
Becky Griffin: Do you know, is there much difference between the species or varieties of bees in North Carolina versus South Carolina?
Amanda Bratcher: There’s a little bit. There are some specialists in each of the states, but I don’t know them well enough to say in specifics. I will say there’s an organization called discoverlife.org, and they have checklists for species in each state. Also, your natural heritage program — if you’re asking from South Carolina, usually the states have a natural heritage program or something where there’s a person in charge of keeping a checklist of the species in the state. So you may want to check that out.
Becky Griffin: That’s very good advice. Susan says, Amanda, on one of your first slides you showed an orange small bee. Can you identify that one? She sees it on her black-eyed Susans all the time.
Amanda Bratcher: Ooh, let’s see. An orange bee. Oh, dear. One of my first slides. That may be — we may have to wait on that one. Some of them I know and some of them I don’t.
Becky Griffin: Well, we’ll look at it and get back to her on that.
Why “Cuckoo” Bee?
Becky Griffin: A couple more. Diane wants to know why the name cuckoo bee.
Amanda Bratcher: It’s a reference to the cuckoo bird. These are typically bee species that are not doing the work of gathering the nectar and pollen for their babies. Instead, they’re finding a nest that they can lay their eggs in, and then the mother bee of the host species will kind of take care of them. Like I said, sometimes the cuckoo bee will lay their egg inside of the nest, and usually they try to hide it or camouflage it. That insect will hatch, and the larva of that one will kill the larva of the host bee, because they need the pollen provision. Or in the case of a social bee, sometimes they’ll kill the queen and then put herself in the queen position and lay her eggs, and then the worker bees will take care of her offspring.
I was reading a book recently, and it can seem really scary when you see that — oh my goodness, this bee is killing this other bee — and you kind of feel for the bee that’s being taken advantage of. But that is the circle of life. I don’t like to say that one is better than the other. All of these organisms have a role in their ecology. And one of the things about cuckoo bees is they control populations. Typically, if you have both the parasitoid — the cuckoo bee species — and its host species, and they’re both still persisting in the environment, that means you actually have a healthy ecosystem, because there’s enough to go around that you can support the host species and it’s still able to make enough offspring, while you have this parasite species that is also able to get enough. So to me, when you start seeing those brood parasites, it’s actually a good thing, because that means there’s enough to go around and there’s a healthy population to support both.
Becky Griffin: I agree, but you have to admit the word cuckoo sounds fun.
Cutting Stems in Fall Versus Spring
Becky Griffin: All right, let’s do one more for now. Can you please elaborate on not cutting stems on plants in the fall versus the spring?
Amanda Bratcher: Most definitely. So the research study that we did was a community science project among Master Gardener volunteers in North Carolina, in conjunction with Elsa Youngsteadt and Hannah Levenson at NC State. We sent them stems from gardens across North Carolina for a whole year. And we found that the bees were populating the stems starting usually in the spring and the summer. So you needed to leave the stems over the winter, but the stems that the bees were utilizing had to be cut. So we compared uncut stems to cut stems and then the timing of them. Bees are populating in the spring and the summer, but they are persisting into kind of year three and then hatching out in the spring and summer. So you kind of have to be able to leave those stems standing in your garden for about two years.
But one thing I tell folks is, you can’t tell. If you have a healthy garden, those stems — as soon as that new flush of growth comes out in the spring — they’re gone. But the stems are still there, tucked into the canopies of the plants. In the wintertime, it can be a bit of a different aesthetic, but overall it does increase the diversity. And I can tell, in our garden alone, we started adopting that practice about a year and a half after I was here, and the species have changed. We are seeing more of those stem-nesting species because we’re providing that habitat.
Becky Griffin: Very nice. Well, thank you very much, Amanda. That was a wonderful presentation, and we’re getting a lot of positive comments. We’ll tackle some of the other questions at the end here.
Dr. Kris Braman: Bees in Our Backyards
Becky Griffin: We’re going to go on to our next speaker, and that is Dr. Kris Braman. She is a professor emerita at the University of Georgia, and she began her work there in 1989. Her research focused on the ecology and management of insect pests of turf and ornamental plants. But most recently, her research and teaching focus has centered around conservation of pollinators and other beneficial arthropods. This is reflected in her most recent publications and invited presentations, including a TEDx Atlanta talk that was given in May 2023, and podcasts in 2024. She has produced with her students over 200 publications, including 167 refereed journal articles and 16 book chapters. She served as the entomology department head from June 2016 to May 2025. She was elected an honorary member of the Entomological Society of America in 2023. She’s also the recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award in Horticultural Entomology, the GGIA Environmental Friend of the Year Award, and she was recognized as the distinguished alum of the Entomology Department at the University of Kentucky. She’s also a 2019 UGA Women’s Leadership Fellow. Dr. Braman’s been very busy in her career and done a lot of amazing things. Welcome, Kris, and the floor is yours.
Kris Braman: Thank you so much, Becky. Let me see if I can share my screen and get us rolling. How are we looking? Well, I want to thank you so much for inviting me to participate, and I’m very excited to be with you all today and continue this great conversation. Amanda, what a wonderful presentation and so much information — very valuable and really sets the stage for continuing this discussion. The small bees are absolutely some of my favorites. And as Amanda has already shared with us, there’s incredible diversity in this group. This visual gives you a little bit of an idea, from the smallest of the bees compared to the bumblebee at the bottom and a honeybee just to the left of the top. So lots and lots of diversity.
And the small bees are among the most numerous of the bee groups that are reported in every census every year. They’re so diverse in appearance, biology, nesting, their plant preferences — lots of interesting things going on. And I like to think of them as very important pollinators in our urban spaces. So what about these VIPs? Amanda gave you great ideas about how to recognize these flower visitors, including some resources. I noticed that she and I have some of the same favorites that we find very useful. So lots of guides and resources out there that are really readily available.
So what kind of magical creatures live in our own backyards? Becky’s asked me to talk about some of our more recent research, and I’m excited to share with you some of the things that my lab has found in recent years about these flying jewels in our backyards. For those that want to learn more, these are the original articles that talked about the diversity that we can find in our residential areas and in our urban spaces. And I’m just going to cut right to the chase and give you the bottom line: that trees are so important. We need to plant more trees for the bees.
The 50-Property Study and the Value of Forests
Kris Braman: So let me share some of the findings of these graduate students and other colleagues over the last few years. What are the secrets of these city bees? In this particular project, we were looking at 50 residential properties and using those colorful pan traps that you saw in the previous slide. We gathered almost 5,000 bees and found 111 species. That represents 20% of all of the bee species reported for Georgia, which is around 540 bee species. So these residential landscapes can support very high diversity. And that diversity is sensitive to what we call landscape context at different scales. Landscape context for us just means what’s around the area that you’re sampling. Is it more characterized by agriculture, or by forest, or by intense urbanization? And then at different scales — are we talking about two meters from that sampling device, or are we talking about 200 meters or more?
So what we found is how important a forest is. In the Northeast, at least a third of the bees are forest dependent. And in Georgia, in the studies that we’ve done, as much as 83% are forest associated, with 26% found exclusively in that forest context. And this really should not surprise us, because if we think historically, the entire East Coast was forested. But what does that tell us? What are the implications for insect conservation? Number one, our residential landscapes can support very high bee diversity — lots of opportunities here. Some bee species are favored by the open conditions that are characteristic of developed areas. But forest remnants appear to be extremely valuable habitats for many bee species, and so are very important to our regional bee diversity. And urban planning that prioritizes and incorporates forest remnants will help promote that bee abundance and diversity.
The Eight-Site Athens Study: Bee Functional Groups
Kris Braman: We were then interested in doing a follow-up study. What is it about these little forest areas that can help support bees? So we looked at eight sites across Athens — residential, agricultural, and recreational, parks and rec. And we were interested in looking at edge versus interior. You might notice we also have some bee houses here that helped us as a type of passive sampling, in addition to the pan traps and to some vane traps, which were pulled up into the canopies at a height of 15 feet. Here again, we were able to gather a lot of bees — 122 different species of bees on just these eight sites. So in almost all of the studies we’ve done, we have been able to document between 20 and 30 percent of all of the bee species that are found in Georgia.
Now, this figure tells us a few things about characterizing the bees that we find in these urban environments. The bar graphs on the left-hand side are just sheer abundance of bees, all the bees together. The bars on the right-hand side represent the number of bee species. Here we are looking at what we call functional groups. So, where do the bees nest? Are they in cavities? Are they in the litter? Are they in already-occupied spaces? Or are they in the soil? Then we looked at origin — are they native or are they exotic? Then we looked at sociality — are they eusocial, are they parasitic, or are they solitary bees? Diet breadth just means, are they specialist on a certain type of plant, like Amanda showed us the hibiscus bee, which is somewhat of a specialist? Or are they generalist, where they would visit a wide variety of different flower types? Seasonality — are they early, mid, or late summer activity patterns? And then, of course, size — small, medium, and large bees.
So to distill this all down, what do we find in our urban spaces? Most of the species can be categorized as small bees that are solitary, active early in the season and mid-season, soil-nesting native generalists. So that’s typically what we’re going to find and what we can provide resources for. We also found that the bee abundance and number of species were higher at the forest edge than at the interior. And no surprise there — more open space, probably more flower density. There’s distinct community compositions in both locations. And it turns out that canopy cover, invasive shrub cover, ground cover, and tree diversity influence what kind of species we’re going to find. For example, when we have more ground cover, we have fewer soil-nesting bees, because they don’t have access to the nesting resource that they would need.
Andrena and Nomada
Kris Braman: I can’t show you all 122 species, but I can show you a couple of the groups, and Amanda has mentioned these. The andrenids, Andrena, are really interesting to me. These are some of the earliest bees that are active in our area — I mean, late February, early March, even early February you can see some of these bees be active. And then other species come out later in the season across the summer. We found 30 species of these Andrena. And they’re wonderful soil-dwelling bees, mostly solitary, but sometimes communal. In other words, remember that first slide that Amanda put up, where the bees are gregarious? They have solitary nests, but there are many of those in a certain area.
And Amanda also seems to be fascinated by these parasitic bees, as am I. Nomada — this group is less well-studied than some of the others. In fact, for many, we don’t even know what the hosts are. They look a little more like wasps than bees, because they’re not gathering the pollen and the nectar to feed their own bees. Instead, they’re taking advantage of host bees, which are very often andrenids. So Amanda mentioned that while we might initially think that this is a negative for our bee communities, in fact, many look at the Nomada as indicator species. They are very sensitive to environmental disturbance, and also they can indicate, wow, we’ve got a really healthy population of host bees. So we have so much more to learn about these. And Miriam Lyon, who was the student leading this project, found 17 different species of Nomada in this single study at eight sites. Amazing.
So our findings help establish the effects of these different forest characteristics on the community composition of wild bees, and also really further cement the conservation value of urban forests.
Bee Houses and Their Colonizers
Kris Braman: Now, I’d like to share a short video with you. It takes about 40 seconds, and I want you to tell me how it makes you feel and what maybe you notice about the background. Would you enjoy what you see here? Or would you be more like my brother, who I shared this video with just this weekend, who said, “I’m a little scared”? So this is part of the challenge, as we are wild bee advocates and we celebrate the bees and we share with our family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues — that these bees are really docile and that we should absolutely just enjoy the spectacle. Keith Delaplane sent me this video a couple of springs ago, because he just wanted to share this amazing sight. And this is at Ben Burton, one of the eight locations that we were sampling at.
Well, what about the bee houses that we saw in that earlier slide? We want to do something about trying to provide some more nesting resources for our bees. Are bee houses helpful? It turns out that we still have a lot to learn about optimizing use of bee houses. Here’s a little study where we put out 30 nesting boxes in school, community, and research gardens in the metro Atlanta area. And we were thrilled when we had such good colonization. We got lots of mason bees and leafcutter bees and even some pollinating wasps like potter wasps. And then, as we waited for the emergence, we were able to see some of these little bees emerge from these little bee blocks. But we also found a number of these small parasitic wasps in the genus Melittobia. So we want to be careful when we are using these bee houses not to leave them up too long. We don’t want to let disease or parasites build up in the area.
Now, in the study that I mentioned just previously with the eight sites, these are the type of bee houses that we put up. And Miriam, again leading the project, found completely different results, where the vast majority of residents — and we had a lot of colonization — they were primarily exotic bees, including the giant resin bee that Amanda spoke about earlier, Megachile sculpturalis, in the orange bar here, and Osmia taurus, which is an exotic mason bee that has gained in numbers over the past decade tremendously. Now, in the pan traps, we found a number of other species of mason bees. So what we found in these bee houses is not representative of the community. But for some reason, the exotic bees were more abundant in the bee houses than the native bees.
Leafcutter Damage and the Asian Needle Ant
Kris Braman: Well, quick question for you. When you see this, is this something that we need to treat for? The answer, of course, is no. Those half-moon circles around the edges of the leaves are made by our leafcutter bees. They just roll them into the little leaf rolls, inside which they will rear their young. So while we may be a little bit alarmed at seeing that kind of leaf damage, it doesn’t harm the plant. And it’s great to recognize that just means, oh wow, we’ve got a lot of leafcutters in the area. So one of the main lessons I have learned is that we just need to tolerate a little messiness in our yards and gardens. Similar to Amanda talking about leaving the stems so that bees have some place to nest, there are lots of ways where not being too tidy can help us a lot.
Here are some of the other leafcutter bees, some of which Amanda has already shown us. So leafcutter and mason bees are cavity dwellers and are small to medium size, and there are a number of different species that you are very likely to see as you participate in the pollinator census. Here’s a little video, again just in my backyard, of a leafcutter on milkweed, and you will notice that she gathers her pollen and packs it on the underside of her abdomen.
Well, I mentioned exotic bees being possibly problematic, maybe overtaking some of our native bees, but also other exotics. In this case, the Asian needle ant is now suspected of causing the decline in these absolutely beautiful wood-nesting bees, where possibly a decline of as much as 70% in the last 10 years in Georgia — and these exotic ants may be responsible.
Flowers for Eroded Sites
Kris Braman: Well, let’s talk about some plants for some tough situations. This was a project I got the chance to be involved in, where a severely eroded area was regraded and amended. And I was asked to work on adding floral resources to a typically grass-based erosion mitigation mix. So, also cutting to the bottom line here, we found several plants that did extremely well, had great establishment, and were great attractors for our pollinators. Black-eyed Susan, we’re all familiar with. Partridge pea, good for certain situations. Rattlesnake master — if you don’t know this plant, I’d encourage you to look into it, a wonderful native plant. Coreopsis, and of course, mountain mint.
We were able to sample many, many bees, some using just straight sweep sampling [VERIFY: "bee sampling" — possibly "beat sampling"] to evaluate the effect of adding flowers to the area. And then also we did a lot of bee-flower sampling, so that we would know what bees visited which flowers. Bees in the genera Lasioglossum, Halictus, and Bombus were the most abundant of all the bees that we found in this study. And this figure says, no surprise here: if you add flowers, bees will come. But the extent is astonishing — 33 times more bees than in a grass area alone is what this figure says.
We have a surprising lack of information about what bee species visit which flowers. So we were able to make some progress here. This is what you call a bee-to-flower network. For example, if you look at black-eyed Susan, you will see that Halictus ligatus is probably the most frequent visitor. But look at all those lines that go to black-eyed Susan — they support lots and lots of bees. If we look at our rattlesnake master, great plant — wow, they are just tremendously helpful for Lasioglossum. So the wider the bar, the more individuals of those bee species. So it gave us a lot of great information about what we can expect from these flowers that we are encouraging people to add to our landscapes. And we were also able to overlay the activity of the bees with the major bloom of the flowers. For example, the gray bars are rattlesnake master, and the dark lines that are peaking as the gray bars peak — well, Lasioglossum and rattlesnake master are really in good synchrony. And we found a lot of halictids. Amanda has gone over much of this, so I won’t belabor the point, but oh, what a wonderful group of bees that I am sure you will see as you participate in the census.
And you notice, again, so many of these bees are ground-nesting bees. So if we consider leaving some spaces of bare ground to support not just the flight activity, not just floral resources, but let’s leave some nesting resources that include sometimes leaving some bare ground. So basically we were able to document the use of floral resources in this particular reclamation situation and identify which bees went to which plants.
Grasses, Specialist Bees, and Native Plants
Kris Braman: Now, we are very focused on the flowers and the trees, but what about the grasses? There’s been some surprising results that have come out of Shimat Joseph’s lab recently, showing the value of some of our grasses for bees, where they have found a lot of bees on centipedegrass. So we don’t want to discount them.
I do want to give a shout out to these specialist bees, because sometimes plants that we put out there can really make a difference. This is scentless mock orange. It is an eastern native, and it has some specialist bees that really need it. As I put this out in my home garden, within that first bloom, here came the bees, the specialist bees. If we plant this, they will come. Amanda mentioned the hibiscus bee. Other specialists — Andrena violae, I’m sure you can imagine what flowers they go to, violets — and our squash bee. I have it as Peponapis pruinosa; it’s now in a new genus, Eucera. Lots of information coming at you today.
Five Simple Things for Bee Conservation
Kris Braman: So what can we do to help promote and conserve our bees? I like to throw out five simple things that everybody can do. One is just tolerate a little messiness in your yard and garden — I can certainly check that box. Got to be sure that the bees have access to water. Consider leaving those little bare spots in your yard for ground-nesting bees. When you trim the flowers, leave some stems so the nesting bees will have a home, and Amanda mentioned more detail about how we should manage that. Instead of a formal garden, go for the cottage garden with a riot of color all season long, so that bees have resources all season long. And plant more trees for the bees.
We need to garden as if life depended on it, because it surely does. And everybody has an opportunity to make a difference. I am very much a proponent of this shift toward ecological aesthetics, where what we see as desirable is that which has fewer negative environmental consequences and really supports the native wildlife in our area. These photos are from the UGA golf course, where they have recently installed new pollinator gardens using lots of native plants, so I’m so excited about that.
Well, what flowers can we use? This is a small study that we conducted in Griffin some time ago. Because different flowers attract different pollinators, as you might imagine — where coreopsis attracted a lot of small bees, salvia might attract a whole different spectrum of bees. And even among the different cultivars, in our study here, ‘Hot Paprika’ was the most attractive to bees and indeed to total pollinators. But all were visited by bees and pollinators. We have to be aware of some potential unintended consequences. Coreopsis now is a native wildflower that’s widely available as a number of cultivars and as part of wildflower seed mixes. Until 2001, these beetles that you see as little tiny black dots that have ravaged the coreopsis stems used to be very rare. But they are no longer rare, and they’re something we need to look out for. Once again, if we plant it, they will come, but we have to watch out for what we are attracting. And sometimes the benefits outweigh some of the negatives.
I’m thrilled with what’s happening in UGA’s horticulture department. Three recent graduate students have worked on collections of native plants and how we can adapt them for use in our home landscape, including the mountain mints, the bee balm, and the milkweeds. So I’m really happy with the direction and availability of some of these native plants for our use in urban environments. I have a couple favorites — this hyssop, or the giant blue agastache, and then, of course, mountain mints; we’ve heard that several times. And one of my absolute favorites is the climbing aster. Not suitable for every space, but if you have a space for it, this blooms later in the season when very few other things are blooming and available for pollinators. And it was also selected as a pollinator plant of the year choice in UGA’s Pollinator Plant of the Year program in 2025.
We have a number of bulletins and circulars that can help you as you look for further resources in selecting trees and shrubs or other types of plants, or building nesting boxes, so I encourage you to check those out. And some of our colleagues have discovered that there are ways to overcome barriers to pollinator conservation behaviors and encourage people to adopt them. People that are aware of the issues, have a positive attitude toward pollinators, and maybe have some prior experience with pollinators are much more likely to adopt conservation behaviors. Well, how do we address all three of those? Through the pollinator census. So I’m just delighted with everybody that is participating in these sessions, and I’m looking forward to participating in the census. I hope you are too. Thank you so much.
Questions and Answers: Habitat and Management
Becky Griffin: Thank you, Dr. Braman. Again, the pictures were amazing, and I took lots and lots of notes, especially with the plants. Personally, I have a deer issue, so that’s a big problem, and I know you and Amanda both have beautiful gardens that I’m very envious of. All right, we have a few more minutes, so let’s attack some of these questions.
Soil for Ground-Nesting Bees
Becky Griffin: Are there recommendations for providing habitat for soil-nesting bees? What is our recommendation for the soil for those ground-nesting bees?
Kris Braman: In general, you want to have native soil. Now, there are some that have actually built areas, and maybe they add more sand, depending on what type of bees — if you know the species that you are hoping to encourage. And then another thing that I like to mention, and I forgot to, is limiting the typical mulch. But gravel mulch seems to be compatible with soil-nesting bees. So sometimes we can even encourage the use of gravel mulch and gravel pathways, where the bees can still utilize the soil.
Petal Damage on Coneflowers
Becky Griffin: Okay, Joan Reed wants to know, she was noticing something was eating the petals off of her coneflowers. Could that have been a small bee?
Kris Braman: It absolutely could have been, yes. But then there are also some other leaf-feeding beetles, like the one I mentioned on coreopsis. And sometimes, if there’s a nibble taken here and there, we’re not going to be too concerned about that. But yes, it could have been a bee.
Bee Houses and Exotic Bees
Becky Griffin: Avery has a good question. Do you think that the non-native bee species are using the bee houses because they don’t have a local host plant for nesting, since they are exotic?
Kris Braman: What I think may be happening, especially with the Osmia taurus, is they are cavity nesters. So my thought is — and we’ve got several years now and thousands and thousands of bees, so I can track their activity — Osmia taurus comes out first. It emerges first. So if you’re first on the site, you have an advantage and dominate the resource. Now, with the giant resin bee, I think it’s just about it being suitable. I don’t know if any of you have also noticed what I have observed, when giant resin bees are pulling carpenter bees out of their own nests. So they are very aggressive bees. In fact, they fight each other off. So I think in that case, their level of aggression just wins.
Cutting and Managing Stems
Becky Griffin: All right, I’m going to go ahead and launch our post-webinar poll while we finish up with some questions. We still have some confusion about leaving the stems. So can we leave the stems by turning them over and just putting them on the ground? Can we cut the stem halfway down, or do we have to leave it entirely? Can we cut them and move them? So do you all mind going over that again?
Kris Braman: I’m going to ask Amanda to chime in on this one. She’s got a lot of experience with this.
Amanda Bratcher: So the research that we did shows that they are best utilized while remaining attached to the plant. And the recommendation is to trim them to 18 to 24 inches. Obviously, there are some things that are not that tall, so in the case of smaller plants, it’s okay to just make sure that there’s a cut edge to those stems. What the research has found is, the shorter the stem, the more likely there’s going to be just male bee eggs laid. So the longer the stem, the more gender diversity you’re going to get in those populations. So the longer the better. But different plant species support different bee species, because some of them will use hollow stems, and some of them like to burrow through pith. Now, cutting them and laying them on the ground is not recommended, because the species that are utilizing stems are not necessarily sealing them such that they won’t be susceptible to fungi and bacteria coming up through the soil and saturating that stem. So you’re more likely going to create kind of a trap for those bees if they do utilize it. So keeping them high and dry is good.
I have utilized them in bee hotel bundles for one season, and that’s enough. I’ve also seen people have success using them in some of those natural fencing where you can kind of stack the stems. So as long as they’re not in contact with the ground, sometimes they will be utilized.
Becky Griffin: Great. That’s what the research says, so that’s what we need to go with. I remember when these first came out, we all used them and weren’t sure, but now that we have some research answers, that is always the best.
Early-Spring Forage
Becky Griffin: All right, we’ve got one more question, and remember, the rest of the questions we will answer and they will be put on the recordings webpage. But last question: when the early bees come out in the early spring, what do they eat? How can we help provide food and habitat for them?
Kris Braman: That’s a great question. So this is where trees become so important, because those early-season blooming trees — think maples, and willows — these are really important. And then there’s the ground cover, native ephemerals that are in our wooded areas. Those can be very important. But really, I’m just going to hammer home: trees for the bees.
Closing
Becky Griffin: Yes, very good. Well, I want to thank our presenters for sharing their time and their talents and expertise. I know we all learned quite a bit. And although some of it may seem a little, “hey, does that help me with the census?” — I think we all can go in a little more confident. And as Amanda mentioned, let’s do some practicing, because we have about six weeks to go. And I really do encourage — just like Kris and Amanda said — get out there and see what’s there. Spend some time. You work hard in your garden, weeding and watering. Spend some time with some sweet tea and a practice census, and I think that you will find a lot of diversity in your own gardens and a lot of these beautiful bees that we saw photos of today.
And I want to thank all of our attendees for coming, and the great questions and the great responses. I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did. Again, Rich is going to do an expert job at editing our recordings and making them great for us, and that and resources will be put on the recordings webpage when they’re ready to go. And I want to encourage you guys to join us next week — we’re going to talk about honeybees. We’ve got Dr. Jamie Ellis, newly back at UGA; I sent him a note that said, “Welcome home.” We have him, and we also have Bethany Arrear, who is in the state of Alabama. She’s the Census State Coordinator. So we’ll look forward to seeing her as well.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / GTBOP Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1) — GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-07_SmallBees.srt (259 blocks)