Solitary

Bees living this way. Around ninety per cent of bee species are solitary, and the social ones people picture when they think of bees are a small and unrepresentative minority.

45 records · social structure

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.
Mining beesAndrenaSolitary ground-nesting bees, and the small volcano-shaped mounds of fine soil that appear on lawns and bare paths in April are theirs. Mining bees are the classic spring solitary bees of the northern hemisphere: short-lived, entirely harmless, often nesting in dense aggregations that look like a colony but are not, and a great many of them are specialists that visit only one kind of flower.
Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.
Ivy beeColletes hederaeA bee that was not recognised as a species until 1993, was unknown in Britain until 2001, and is now one of the commonest autumn bees across southern England. The ivy bee emerges in September, forages almost exclusively on ivy flowers, nests in enormous ground aggregations, and is gone by November. It is one of the few insects whose entire annual cycle is built around a single plant, and one of the clearest records anyone has of a species expanding its range in real time.
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.
Squash beesEucera subgenus Peponapis and XenoglossaBees that fly before dawn to reach flowers that close by mid-morning, and that feed their young on the pollen of one plant family and no other. Squash bees are specialists on Cucurbita — pumpkin, squash, courgette and the wild gourds those crops came from — and they spread across North America with the crop as Indigenous farmers carried it north from Mexico. In many squash fields they do the whole job of pollination before the contracted honey bees have got up.
Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
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.
Tawny mining beeAndrena fulvaThe bright orange bee that appears on lawns in April and produces small volcano-shaped mounds of soil, prompting a great many alarmed enquiries about infestations. It is a solitary bee, it is entirely harmless, the mounds disappear within weeks, and it is one of the most conspicuous and most misidentified insects of the British spring.
Digger beesAnthophoraFast, furry, bumblebee-like solitary bees that hover in front of a flower before darting into it, and among the earliest substantial bees of the spring. The hairy-footed flower bee is the one most British gardeners meet — the females black and the males gingery, so different that they were long thought to be separate species — and it is a specialist of deep tubular flowers that honey bees cannot use.
Plasterer beesColletesSolitary ground-nesting bees that line their cells with a self-produced plastic. A female Colletes paints the walls of each cell with a secretion applied by her short forked tongue, which polymerises into a transparent, waterproof, cellophane-like membrane — a genuine biological polyester, and one of the most remarkable materials any insect makes. It waterproofs the cell against the damp sandy ground these bees prefer.
Small carpenter beesCeratinaTiny, shiny, metallic dark-green or blue-black bees that excavate nests in the soft pith of broken stems — bramble, raspberry, elder, sumac — and then, unusually for a solitary bee, stay with their offspring. A Ceratina mother guards her nest through development and in some species is still alive when her young emerge, which puts the genus at one of the evolutionary staging posts between solitary living and true sociality.
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.
Alkali beeNomia melanderiA ground-nesting American bee managed at a scale nothing else matches: growers in the Walla Walla valley of Washington State build and irrigate artificial salt-crusted nesting beds covering hectares, in which millions of females nest, and then farm alfalfa seed around them. It is the only significant case anywhere of a wild ground-nesting bee being managed by engineering its habitat rather than by housing it.
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.
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.
Ashy mining beeAndrena cinerariaOne of the most strikingly marked solitary bees in Europe, and one of the easiest to recognise: a black bee with two clean bands of ash-grey hair across the thorax and a distinctly blue-black shine to the abdomen. It nests in lawns, banks and short turf in loose aggregations, and it is entirely harmless to anyone standing over it.
Hairy-footed flower beeAnthophora plumipesA fast, furry, hovering bee that appears in gardens in early March and is regularly reported as two different species, because the sexes look nothing alike: the females are entirely black with orange pollen brushes, the males gingery-brown with long feathery hairs on their middle legs. It is one of the earliest substantial bees of the year and a specialist of the deep spring flowers honey bees cannot reach.
Oil-collecting beesMacropisBees that collect floral oil instead of nectar, and one of the few groups that overturn the usual description of what a bee does. Macropis females gather fatty oil from specialised glands on yellow loosestrife flowers, mix it with pollen to provision their cells, and use it again to waterproof the nest — which lets them nest in damp ground where other bees cannot. The relationship is obligate in both directions.
Fairy beesPerditaThe smallest bees on earth, and among the most specialised. Perdita minima is under two millimetres long — smaller than a grain of rice, small enough that its shadow is easier to see than the bee — and the genus as a whole is a radiation of tiny desert specialists, most of which provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus and fly for only a few weeks a year.
Yellow-legged mining beeAndrena flavipesOne of the few European mining bees with two generations a year, which makes it visible from March right through to September while most of its relatives have a few weeks and disappear. It nests in dense aggregations that can run to many thousands of burrows in a single south-facing bank, and it is among the commonest and most watchable solitary bees in southern Britain.
Large scabious mining beeAndrena hattorfianaA large, scarce mining bee that provisions its cells with the pollen of field scabious and its close relatives, and nothing else. It is one of the clearest examples in northern Europe of an obligate specialist: where the plant goes, the bee goes, and its decline tracks the loss of unimproved chalk grassland almost exactly.
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.
Violet carpenter beeXylocopa violaceaOne of Europe's largest and most spectacular bees — a jet-black insect the size of a small bird with wings that flash iridescent violet in sunlight. It excavates nest tunnels in dead wood, and it has expanded northwards across Europe over recent decades, reaching southern England where it was formerly a rarity.
Pantaloon beeDasypoda hirtipesA mining bee with the most extravagant pollen brushes of any European species — enormous golden hair fans on the hind legs that look like a pair of feathered trousers and give the bee its name. It is a sandy-soil specialist working composites, and a female returning to her burrow loaded with pollen is one of the more comic sights in British entomology.
Sea aster beeColletes halophilusA plasterer bee restricted almost entirely to saltmarsh and coastal grazing marsh in southeast England and adjacent Europe, provisioning its cells with the pollen of sea aster and flying only in the few weeks that plant is in flower. It is a globally scarce species with a substantial share of its world population in the Thames and Essex estuaries.
Bryony beeAndrena floreaA mining bee that provisions its cells exclusively with the pollen of white bryony, a hedgerow climber that most people know only as a weed. It is a strict specialist on a single plant species, it has expanded its British range substantially over recent decades, and it exists as a network of small populations wherever that one climber grows.
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.
Augochlora beesAugochloraBrilliant metallic green sweat bees that nest in rotting wood rather than in soil — unusual among halictids, and the reason they persist in closed woodland where ground-nesting bees cannot. Augochlora pura is a common and dazzling bee of eastern North American forest, and it is entirely solitary despite belonging to a largely social family.
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.
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.
Early mining beeAndrena haemorrhoaOne of the commonest and earliest mining bees in northern Europe, and among the first solitary bees most people see each year. It has a neat combination of markings that makes it genuinely identifiable in the field, which is unusual in a genus of 1,500 species, and it nests in lawns and banks in loose aggregations.
Vernal colletesColletes cuniculariusA large spring plasterer bee that emerges in March for willow catkins and forms some of the most spectacular nesting aggregations in northern Europe — tens of thousands of burrows in a single dune slope, with clouds of males patrolling above them waiting for females to emerge.
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.
Eastern carpenter beeXylocopa virginicaNorth America's familiar large carpenter bee, and the one that hovers menacingly in front of people around porches and decking each spring. The hovering is done by males, which have no sting whatsoever. It excavates remarkably clean round tunnels in dead softwood, and unusually for a solitary bee it shows the beginnings of social behaviour — related females may share a nest with one reproducing.
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.
Blunthorn beesMelittaGround-nesting bees from one of the oldest bee lineages, and mostly tight floral specialists. Melitta species provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus — bellflowers, knapweed, heather or bird's-foot trefoil depending on the species — and they belong to a family that includes the oil-collecting bees and is now thought to contain the closest living relatives of the ancestral bee.
Shaggy beesPanurgusSmall, entirely black bees with conspicuously shaggy pollen brushes, found almost exclusively on yellow composites. They nest in bare sandy ground in aggregations, and the males have a habit of sleeping inside closed flower heads overnight — several can be found packed into a single hawkbit on a cool morning.
Long-horned beeEucera longicornisA declining British bee whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the species several bee orchids have evolved to impersonate. The orchid produces a flower resembling a female Eucera in shape, texture and scent closely enough that males attempt to mate with it, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany.
Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.

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