Ground Nesting Bees

Insect Alert!
In August we are taking a break from our usual plant-focused programming to help Cornell researchers with Project GNBee learn more about ground nesting bees. What are ground nesting bees anyway? Well, when we think of a bee, we might imagine a beehive—which is a colony of bees, but many native bees don’t fit into this stereotype. In fact, 90% of all bees are solitary, and 70% are ground nesting. Ground nesting bees are solitary bees, meaning they don’t have colonies with a queen and worker bees. Instead of building a beehive, each female bee constructs her own nest in the soil. Just like colony forming bees (or eusocial bees), ground nesting bees are important pollinators and critical for biodiversity and ecosystem health. Despite their importance, little is known about their nesting requirements—which is where Project GNBee comes in. They are aiming to utilize the amazing resource that is community scientists to locate and map ground nesting bee habitat.

Contribute to the effort to learn more about ground nesting bees by making iNaturalist observations. Please join the GNBee project on iNaturalist , and post pictures of ground nesting bees entering or leaving their nests and estimate the number of entrances. To find ground nesting bees, check areas with well-draining soil—gardens, meadows, and sandy areas. Your contributions can aid in understanding the vital role ground nesting bees play and how we can protect them.

To learn more, check out Project GNBee’s website and Instragram.

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Posted on August 1, 2023 04:07 PM by alissa_iverson