Existing cavities and tubes
Bees that nest this way. Nesting habit decides what a garden has to provide — bare sunny soil, dead wood, hollow stems or nothing at all — and it is the half of bee conservation that flower lists leave out.
43 records · nesting habit
- BumblebeesBombusLarge, furry, loud, and cold-tolerant in a way no honey bee is. Bumblebees run annual colonies: a mated queen emerges alone in spring, founds a nest by herself, raises workers through the summer, produces new queens and males in late season, and then the entire colony dies except those new queens. They do make honey, in the strict sense of ripened nectar stores — just a few days' worth, because they have no winter to survive as a colony.
- Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.
- Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
- Stingless beesMeliponiniThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
- Wool carder beeAnthidium manicatumThe bee that shaves plants to line its nest, and the only common bee in which the male is substantially larger than the female. Male wool carder bees hold territories over patches of flowers and attack anything that enters — including honey bees and bumblebees, which they ram, grapple and occasionally kill using spines on the end of the abdomen. It is a small animal behaving like a much larger one, and it is now established on several continents where it does not belong.
- Yellow-faced beesHylaeusThe bees that look least like bees. Yellow-faced bees are small, black, effectively hairless and marked with pale yellow or white on the face, and almost everyone who sees one assumes it is a small wasp. They carry pollen internally, swallowed into the crop and regurgitated at the nest, which means they have no pollen brushes at all — the feature people use to recognise a bee is simply absent. Seven Hawaiian species were the first bees anywhere to be protected under the United States Endangered Species Act.
- Red mason beeOsmia bicornisThe bee in your bee hotel. Osmia bicornis is the commonest cavity-nesting solitary bee in northwest Europe, the one most gardeners actually manage to attract, and one of the most effective fruit pollinators known — a few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as thoroughly as a honey bee colony of tens of thousands. It is also, for practical purposes, incapable of stinging anyone.
- Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisThe commonest bumblebee in Europe, the one reared commercially by the million for tomato pollination, and — as a consequence of that trade — an invasive species on several continents. It is also the bee behind the winter bumblebees now active through December and January in mild British cities, which is a genuine and recent behavioural change.
- Tree bumblebeeBombus hypnorumA bumblebee that was entirely absent from Britain until 2001 and is now one of the commonest in gardens across England and Wales — one of the best-documented range expansions of any insect. It is also the bumblebee most likely to nest in a bird box, and the one responsible for the clouds of males hovering outside them in early summer, which alarms people considerably more than it should.
- Alfalfa leafcutter beeMegachile rotundataThe most intensively managed solitary bee in the world, and the animal that makes alfalfa seed production possible. Honey bees learn to rob alfalfa flowers from the side to avoid being struck on the head by the tripping mechanism, which means they gather nectar and pollinate nothing. The alfalfa leafcutter bee tolerates being tripped, and North American seed growers deploy it by the hundreds of millions.
- Orchid beesEuglossiniBrilliant metallic green, gold and blue bees of the neotropical forest, and the only bees that collect perfume. Male orchid bees gather volatile aromatic compounds from orchids, fungi and rotting wood, store them in hollow chambers in their swollen hind legs, and use the resulting blend in courtship — a behaviour with no parallel anywhere else in the animal kingdom, and one that hundreds of orchid species have evolved to exploit.
- Wallace's giant beeMegachile plutoThe largest bee in the world — a female has a wingspan of around six centimetres and jaws like a stag beetle — and one of the rarest. It nests inside occupied termite mounds in the Indonesian Moluccas, lining a chamber with resin to keep the termites out. It was described by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, not seen again for over a century, rediscovered in 1981, lost again, and photographed alive for the first time only in 2019.
- Garden bumblebeeBombus hortorumThe longest-tongued common bumblebee in Europe, and the one that can feed legitimately from flowers every other bee has to rob. A garden bumblebee's tongue can exceed 15 mm — nearly three times a honey bee's — and it flies with it extended in front like a lance. That single anatomical fact makes it the key pollinator of deep-flowered plants such as red clover, foxglove, comfrey and honeysuckle, and it is also why the species has declined as those plants have.
- Common carder beeBombus pascuorumThe ginger bumblebee that is still flying in November when everything else has finished, and one of the few common bumblebees that has held its ground while others declined. It is a moderately long-tongued species, it nests on the surface rather than underground, and it combs moss and dry grass over the nest — the carding behaviour its name records.
- Red-tailed bumblebeeBombus lapidariusA striking black bumblebee with a bright orange-red tail, and one of the most recognisable insects in a European summer. The queens are large, entirely velvet-black except for the tail, and the males are quite different animals to look at — smaller, with bright yellow facial hair and yellow bands that lead people to report two species where there is one.
- Early bumblebeeBombus pratorumThe smallest and quickest of the common bumblebees, and the one that gets its whole year over with early. Early bumblebee colonies emerge in March, reach reproduction by June and are finished by midsummer — which means the species is often producing new queens while other bumblebees are still building. In a warm year it manages a second generation.
- Blue orchard beeOsmia lignariaNorth America's managed mason bee, and the species increasingly deployed alongside honey bees in Californian almond orchards because it does something honey bees cannot: fly in the cold wet weather that February almond bloom routinely brings. A few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as effectively as a full honey bee colony, and they are sold as cocoons in a box.
- Mayan stingless beeMelipona beecheiiThe bee the Maya kept for two thousand years before anyone brought a honey bee to the Americas, and one whose management came embedded in a religious and calendrical framework rather than an agricultural one. Xunan kab — the royal lady — is a stingless bee kept in hollow log hives sealed at both ends, and its honey is thin, tart and used as medicine as much as food. The tradition very nearly ended, and its revival is as much cultural recovery as beekeeping.
- Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
- Vulture beesTrigona hypogea and allied speciesThe only bees in the world that eat meat. Three Neotropical stingless bee species have given up pollen altogether and provision their nests with carrion instead, landing on dead animals, cutting flesh with specialised teeth, and carrying it home to be processed into a protein store. They have lost the pollen baskets their relatives use and gained a gut microbiome closer to a vulture's than to a bee's.
- White-tailed bumblebeeBombus lucorumOne of the commonest bumblebees in northern Europe, and one that has quietly become three. Genetic work has split Bombus lucorum into a complex of at least three species — lucorum, cryptarum and magnus — that cannot reliably be separated in the field. It is a short-tongued generalist, an accomplished nectar robber, and one of the earliest bumblebees on the wing.
- Rusty patched bumblebeeBombus affinisThe first bumblebee listed as endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act, in 2017. It was common across the eastern and midwestern United States within living memory and has declined by something close to 90% in range since the late 1990s — a collapse fast enough and complete enough that pathogen spillover from commercially reared bumblebees is among the leading explanations.
- Giant Patagonian bumblebeeBombus dahlbomiiThe largest bumblebee in the world — queens exceed 40 mm — and one of the clearest documented cases of a managed bee destroying a native one. Endemic to the temperate forests of southern Chile and Argentina, it was abundant within living memory and has collapsed across most of its range since commercial European bumblebees were imported for glasshouse tomato pollination in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Two-coloured mason beeOsmia bicolorA mason bee that nests inside empty snail shells and then camouflages them, dragging grass stems and pine needles across the ground to build a small thatched pile over the top. It is one of the most extraordinary nesting behaviours of any bee, and it is entirely visible to anyone willing to sit on a chalk bank in April and watch.
- Giant resin beeMegachile sculpturalisA very large east Asian megachild that has established across North America and Europe within two decades, and one of the few solitary bees anywhere to become a genuine invasion concern. It nests in existing cavities, seals them with resin, and has been recorded forcibly evicting native carpenter bees from their tunnels — which is unusual behaviour and the main reason it is watched.
- Heath bumblebeeBombus jonellusA small, neat, short-faced bumblebee of heathland, moorland and coastal dune, and one of the few British species that regularly produces two generations in a season. It looks like a miniature garden bumblebee and is separated from it by the face: short and round rather than long.
- Blue mason beeOsmia caerulescensA small mason bee with a striking sexual difference — the females are metallic blue-black and the males bright golden-brown, so unalike that they are routinely recorded as two species. It nests in small cavities and seals cells with chewed leaf paste rather than mud, which sets it apart from its relatives.
- Horned mason beeOsmia cornutaA large, strikingly marked mason bee of continental Europe — jet black in front and bright orange-red behind — and one of the species managed commercially for orchard pollination alongside the red mason bee. Females carry two conspicuous horns on the face, used to tamp mud into place.
- Small scissor beesChelostomaTiny, slender, cylindrical mason-bee relatives that nest in the narrowest cavities of any bee — beetle holes barely two millimetres across — and several of which provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus. The harebell carpenter bee uses campanula pollen and nothing else, and males sleep inside the closed bells.
- Western bumblebeeBombus occidentalisOnce among the commonest bumblebees of western North America and now scarce across much of that range, in a decline that began abruptly in the late 1990s. It was also reared commercially for glasshouse pollination until production collapsed from disease — which is the same period, and probably not a coincidence.
- Common eastern bumblebeeBombus impatiensNorth America's commercially reared bumblebee, produced by the million for glasshouse tomato and berry pollination, and the continent's counterpart to Europe's buff-tailed bumblebee in both usefulness and controversy. It is abundant, adaptable and thriving while several of its relatives collapse — and its commercial rearing is implicated in some of those collapses.
- Japanese orchard beeOsmia cornifronsA Japanese mason bee managed at scale for apple pollination since the 1940s, and introduced to the United States in the 1970s for the same purpose. In parts of Japan it pollinates the great majority of the apple crop, which makes it one of the few genuine success stories in deploying a non-honey-bee pollinator commercially — and, in North America, a naturalised species now competing with natives.
- Patchwork leafcutter beeMegachile centuncularisThe leafcutter most gardeners actually meet, and the one responsible for the neat semicircular notches in rose and lilac leaves each summer. A female cuts an oval disc in a few seconds, flies off with it held beneath her body, and glues it into a thimble-shaped cell inside a hollow stem or a bee hotel tube.
- Resin beesHeriadesTiny, cylindrical, near-black mason-bee relatives that gather sticky plant resin to seal their nests, and which specialise almost entirely on composites. They use very fine cavities, they have disproportionately large heads for their size, and a nest sealed with a shining resin plug is the sign they have been there.
- Melipona beesMeliponaThe large stingless bees of the American tropics, and the ones worth keeping for honey. Melipona are honey bee sized or bigger, build substantial colonies, and store enough surplus that a hive can be harvested annually without ruining it — which is why every major indigenous beekeeping tradition in the Americas is built on this genus rather than on the smaller meliponines around it.
- Tetragonula beesTetragonulaThe small stingless bees of Asia and Australia, and the genus behind both the Malaysian kelulut industry and Australian sugarbag honey. They are tiny — often three or four millimetres — and they build spiral brood combs and elaborate resin nest entrances that are frequently the easiest way to find them.
- Scaptotrigona beesScaptotrigonaThe populous and pugnacious stingless bees of Mesoamerica. Scaptotrigona colonies run to tens of thousands of workers rather than the few hundred typical of Melipona, and they defend themselves vigorously — which makes them a very different animal to keep, and a considerably more productive one.
- African stingless beesMeliponulaThe least documented stingless bees on earth. Africa has its own meliponine genera, harvested across the equatorial belt for honey valued well above Apis honey, and they are known largely from museum specimens and from the people who harvest them rather than from research.
- JataíTetragonisca angustulaThe most widely kept stingless bee in the Americas and the easiest to recognise — a small golden bee with a wax entrance tube guarded by soldiers that hover in the air outside it, which almost no other bee does.
- KelulutHeterotrigona itamaThe bee behind Southeast Asia's stingless honey industry. Heterotrigona itama is larger than most Asian meliponines, takes readily to log and box hives, and produces enough honey to have supported an industry that barely existed before 2000 and now has its own national standard in Malaysia.
- UruçuMelipona scutellarisThe large stingless bee of northeastern Brazil's Atlantic forest, and the species most Brazilian meliponiculture in the region is built around. Colonies are strong by meliponine standards, which is what makes commercial production possible at all.
- JandaíraMelipona subnitidaThe stingless bee of the Brazilian caatinga, adapted to a semi-arid thorn forest where the flowering follows the rains and the dry season can last most of a year. Smaller than uruçu, and the species most caatinga meliponiculture is built on.
- Robber stingless beesLestrimelittaThe stingless bees that gather no food of their own. Lestrimelitta have lost the pollen-carrying apparatus entirely and live by raiding other meliponine nests — a whole genus of eusocial bees that has abandoned foraging, and the clearest possible demonstration that being a stingless bee does not mean producing honey worth harvesting.
Other nesting habit groups
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