Secret Pollinators

Most native bees don't live in hives — they live alone, underground, in tunnels a single female digs herself. This episode is about what those ground-nesting bees need from a patch of bare earth: the right soil texture...

Do bees actually fight? Yes, and it's more brutal than most people imagine. In this episode: a desert bee whose large-headed males duel underground in fights that always end in death, an Australian burrowing bee whose...

That satisfying snap from the bug zapper on the patio? It's almost never a mosquito. When researchers counted every insect six zappers killed over a full summer, only two-tenths of one percent were biting flies — the...

There's a bee that makes polyester. Not metaphorically — an actual transparent, waterproof, antimicrobial film that she paints onto the walls of her underground nest with a forked tongue. Chemists have analyzed it...

Say "wool" and you picture a sheep — so what do you do with a bee that shears wool off a living plant? Meet the wool carder bee: a thumbnail-sized native that scrapes the soft fuzz from fuzzy-leaved plants like lamb's...

Can a wild bee really disappear for 144 years? A volunteer with a net just proved the answer is stranger than you'd think. We follow the rediscovery of a wool-carder bee last recorded in the 1800s, a sweat bee unseen...

Happy Pollinator Week! Tell someone you love native wild bees and they'll start talking about honey every time. But the honey bee is a European import — it's not even one of the four thousand native wild bee species...

A quick bonus update: how a five-minute email led to an official Montana Pollinator Week proclamation — and how you can get the same thing done in your own state before Pollinator Week wraps up...

It started with one woman's frustration and a unanimous city council vote in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2012. Fourteen years later, more than 400 American towns and college campuses have made formal commitments to...

A bumblebee leaves her nest with no map, no GPS, and no instructions. By the end of the week, she'll have figured out the most efficient route between every flower patch in her territory — reducing her total flight...

A small seaside town north of Dublin set out to save a vanishing ginger-colored bumblebee — and the way they did it holds a lesson for every gardener, balcony grower, and small-space planter in America. This week we...

Go out to a meadow at dusk and look closely at the flowers — some of them are occupied. Wild bees sleep out in the open, and once you know to look, you'll never stop seeing them. In this episode, Kelly opens up the...

For 40 million years, a small group of bees has been pulling off one of the most elegant heists in the insect world. They build no nests. They raise no workers. They never collect a single grain of pollen. Instead, they...

The US olive oil market is worth nearly three billion dollars — and 95 percent of it is imported. But across seven American states, a small, quality-focused domestic industry is growing. And native bees, without...

A brand-new study — published this week in the Journal of Animal Ecology — just revealed something remarkable about bumble bee colonies: they function as living thermostats, maintaining their brood at a precise 30 to 33...