Let's Celebrate World Bee Day on Tuesday May 20, 2025!

 

An ashy digger bee drinks some "lemonade" from lemon weed on Mt. Kobau. Notice the rusty long hairs on her back legs and the matching elbow pads!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's that time of the year again when a biodiverse collection of bees are actively foraging and nesting and keeping our ecosystems healthy and beautiful. Let's celebrate by going out and adding bee observations to iNaturalist. It's so fun to look at bees emerging all across Canada when the pussywillows are providing that early source of pollen and nectar for the earliest emerging guilds of bees and the queen bumble bees. I've been thinking about the earliest and latest plants for supporting bees. If you're on the coast of BC, you could think of bee season "from pussywillows to gumweed." Here in the Okanagan, I would say "from pusywillows to rabbitbrush." Those key early and late plants will vary in each bioregion. Can you find out which are the earliest and latest native bee plants in your area? Check iNaturalist and see which observations are the earliest and latest. Generalist bees like bumble bees need forage from those earliest plants all through the early pussywillows to the late goldenrods and asters when the newly emerged gynes are fattening up for hibernation. Think of it as the "gyne to gyne" period.

 

We've almost passed the gyne season here in the Okanagan and the little worker bumble bees are bringing the pollen back to the nest to feed their baby sisters. When I'm identifying bees on iNaturalist I like to add information about the plants the bees are visiting and whether they are collecting pollen. On Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, the workers and solitary bees are mining the camas pollen right now. Here in the south Okanagan, the silky lupins are starting to bloom and provide pollen for worker bumble bees. On the coast and the interior, citizen scientists are making quite a few observations of the death camas bee. If you do come upon a patch of the flowers, keep you eye out for these toxic-tolerant mining bees!

As you can see, on the Native Bee Society of BC Bee Tracker Project we are close to the 65, 000 mark for bee observations in BC. Let's blast past that milestone to honour World Bee Day!!!! We want to see your bees! We want to ID your bees! And please let us know which flowers you are seeing the bees feeding on. It really helps us to have this information, if you know it.

 

And please check out Bob McDougall's World Bee Day Project which is inclusive of other pollinators. In the project journal he writes eloquently about why we need to protect and celebrate these keystone species. And you may find some rare insects when you're looking for bees. I've found the nine-spotted ladybug, Behr's hairstreak butterfly and a rare bee fly when I'm out taking photos of bees. (I consider these FOBs or Friends of Bees!)

 

 

I'd like to thank all the folks across Canada that are adding bee observations to iNaturalist. Together we can protect and celebrate over 800 species of native bees that live here. And remember . . . every day is a bee day!!!!