Late spring is a busy season for bees and other pollinators in the Santa Monica Mountains. Although honeybees are the most abundant and easily recognized bee—any plant that attracts enough of them hums as if charged with electricity—they are relative newcomers to the complex web of life in the Santa Monica Mountains.
California historian John Albert Wilson devoted considerable space to bees in his 1880 History of Los Angeles County. According to him, “It would seem that bees were wholly unknown in California until 1853, when a M. Shelton imported two hives by way of the Isthmus, these being the only living survivors of a large number with which he left the East. He settled in Santa Clara county, and from these two colonies, all the bees now in California are supposed to have sprung.”
Wilson described honeybees as California’s “littlest livestock,” and described at length their value to the economy of the state—he was himself a beekeeper. That remains true. Domesticated honeybees are vitally important to California agriculture, providing widescale crop pollination—honey is just a sideline, but native bees are also valuable pollinators, even for commercial agriculture, and there is a growing body of research that shows that some may be better, more efficient pollinators—a five-year study as much as two to three times better, depending on the species of bee and they type of crop.
Unlike honeybees, which live in a colony where workers are continually being replaced and are active whenever the ambient temperature is warm enough, most native bees are solitary, and only active during the spring and early summer. Their lives are tied to those of the plants they have evolved to rely on for food and, in turn, pollinate. They cannot be put into hive boxes and transported from one crop to the next. Almost none of them are active in late winter, when bee-dependent California crops like Almonds, bloom. They are not “livestock,” they are individuals.
The vast majority of California native bees live solitary lives. Hatching in the spring, mating, building a nest, and providing a store of food for their young, before dying. Many of these species have industrious names: carpenter bees, miner bees, mason bees. They build nests out of mud, or burrow into wood or earth. They don’t make or store large quantities of honey, the way honeybees do, because they don’t need to. And because they don’t have a colony to protect they are rarely aggressive and seldom sting, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t. The females of many species of native bees are armed with stings and venom. However, these are peaceable insects that prefer to live and let live, and that is just what they do: quietly, efficiently, pollinating flowering plants in the chaparral, in the coastal sage scrub, and in our own gardens, where new research suggests they may help produce better quality fruits and vegetables by doing a more thorough job of pollinating them than their European cousins.
Recognising the value of native bees is a new phenomenon and it may be coming too late to help the most vulnerable species. Krystal Hickman is a conservation photographer, was drawn to the study of native bees after photographing an unfamiliar bee while documenting honeybees. It turned out to be a member of the mining bee family, Andrena, and it introduced her to an entirely new world, but also to the revelation that, while domesticated honey bees face a growing number of threats ranging from pesticide toxicity to climate change, native bees are the ones at greatest risk for extinction.
“Native bees can serve as indicator insects,” Hickman writes. “Their presence, absence, or changes in their numbers can often be the first signal of issues in an ecosystem, such as climate change, pollution, or habitat loss.”
Look into the heart of a single mariposa lily or bindweed flower and odds are high that it will be occupied by native bees, gathering pollen or snoozing in the comparative safety of the cup-like blossoms. Look closely at millions of tiny white flowers covering the toyon and an entire miniature world is revealed: a fairyland of gossamer wings and ethereal creatures, a jungle populated with prey and predators. Most of us—even those of us who live on the edge of the wild or completely surrounded by it—may see only a few species, but that doesn’t mean others aren’t present.
Of the approximately 20,000 bee species found throughout the world and 3,600 native bee species in North America, California is home to 1,600. “It’s hard to overstate the dazzling variety of wild bees in California,” writes Emily Underwood in a feature on native bees for Flora Magazine, the publication of the California Native Plant Society. Underwood, the publications editor for the California Native Plant Society, adds that former CNPS executive director Dan Gluesenkamp has described the state as “the Amazon Basin of bee diversity.”
The Santa Monica Mountains remain an island of native bee habitat in a sea of urban development, and those of us who live here are likely to share our lives with a surprising number of species. Our bee neighbors range from the large, loud, and impossible-to-miss Xylocopa californica (the Western carpenter bee) to the tiny sweat bees (members of the family Halictidae).
As spring rapidly heats up and turns to summer, native bees are busy collecting pollen and building nests. Many of the smaller bees go about their business almost completely unobserved by most humans, others are mistaken for honey bees, but it’s easy to spot the bindweed turret bees (Diadasia bituberculata) and its fuzzier relative the ochraceous chimney bee (Diadasia ochracea) in the wildlands and the garden, and no one can miss seeing a bumblebees. The yellow-faced bumblebee (Bombus vosnesenskii), and the black-tailed bumblebee (Bombus melanopygus) are regular garden residents, but if one is incredibly lucky while hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains backcountry one might have a chance to see Crotch’s bumblebee (Bombus crotchii), a California endangered species that has pushed out of more than eighty percent of its range but still clings to life in small pockets of habitat in the local mountains.
Because the bees depend on certain plants and those plants depend on their specific pollinators, the loss of one can create an extinction cascade.
What can we do, as individuals, to slow that slide? Here in the Santa Monica Mountains, quite a lot. Planting native plants in the garden, leaving fallen twigs and branches and a bit of bare earth to provide habitat, and avoiding pesticides are all things that can help the local native bee population. Grassroots activism resulted in the California Pollinator Protection Act (AB 363) of 2023, which banned the sale of lawn and garden “neonic” pesticides to the general public, beginning last year. That legislation was an important step, but the use of this class of pesticides by pest control companies and in agriculture remains widespread. Keeping the issue alive and continuing to push for change, no matter how slow that process is, is critically important.
Just being aware of the bees around us can help. We live in a much more diverse and complex world than we sometimes realize. That bee in the bindweed flower by the fence might not be what one thinks: it could be the key that opens an entire new world of strange and wonderful things, right there in the backyard.
The author’s father kept honeybees when she was a child. He always said “you have to tell the bees your news,” but maybe it’s just as important to listen to what the bees have to say.
